David Novak: Natural Law and Revealed Torah : Natural Law and Revealed Torah [1 ed.] 9789004263444, 9789004259904

Citation preview

David Novak

Library of Contemporary Jewish Philosophers Editor-in-Chief

Hava Tirosh-Samuelson, Arizona State University Editor

Aaron W. Hughes, University of Rochester

Volume 3

The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/lcjp

David Novak Natural Law and Revealed Torah Edited by

Hava Tirosh-Samuelson and Aaron W. Hughes

Leiden • boston 2014

Cover illustration: Courtesy of David Novak. The series Library of Contemporary Jewish Philosophers was generously supported by the Baron Foundation. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data David Novak : natural law and revealed Torah / edited by Hava Tirosh-Samuelson and Aaron W. Hughes.   pages cm. — (Library of contemporary Jewish philosophers, ISSN 2213-6010 ; Volume 3)  Includes bibliographical references.  ISBN 978-90-04-25990-4 (hardback : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-90-04-25820-4 (pbk. : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-90-04-26344-4 (e-book) 1. Novak, David, 1941—Philosophy. 2. Jewish philosophy— 20th century. I. Tirosh-Samuelson, Hava, 1950– editor of compilation. II. Hughes, Aaron W., 1968– editor of compilation.  B5800.D38 2013  296.3092—dc23 

2013034678

This publication has been typeset in the multilingual “Brill” typeface. With over 5,100 characters covering Latin, IPA, Greek, and Cyrillic, this typeface is especially suitable for use in the humanities. For more information, please see www.brill.com/brill-typeface. ISSN 2213-6010 ISBN 978-90-04-25990-4 (hardback) ISBN 978-90-04-26344-4 (e-book) This hardback is also published in paperback under ISBN 978-90-04-25820-4. Copyright 2014 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Global Oriental, Hotei Publishing, IDC Publishers and Martinus Nijhoff Publishers. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Koninklijke Brill NV provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910, Danvers, MA 01923, USA. Fees are subject to change. This book is printed on acid-free paper.

Contents Editors’ Introduction to Series .....................................................................

vii

David Novak: An Intellectual Portrait .......................................................  Aaron W. Hughes

1

Divine Justice/Divine Command ................................................................

19

Are Philosophical Proofs of the Existence of God Theologically Meaningful? ..................................................................................................

39

Buber’s Critique of Heidegger ......................................................................

53

On Human Dignity ..........................................................................................

71

Interview with David Novak ........................................................................  Hava Tirosh-Samuelson

89

Selected Bibliography ..................................................................................... 141

Editors’ Introduction to Series It is customary to begin studies devoted to the topic of Jewish philosophy defining what exactly this term, concept, or even discipline is. We tend not to speak of Jewish mathematics, Jewish physics, or Jewish sociology, so why refer to something as “Jewish philosophy”? Indeed, this is the great paradox of Jewish philosophy. On the one hand it presumably names something that has to do with thinking, on the other it implies some sort of national, ethnic, or religious identity of those who engage in such activity. Is not philosophy just philosophy, regardless of who philosophizes? Why the need to append various racial, national, or religious adjectives to it?1 Jewish philosophy is indeed rooted in a paradox since it refers to philosophical activity carried out by those who call themselves Jews. As philosophy, this activity makes claims of universal validity, but as an activity by a well-defined group of people it is inherently particularistic. The question “What is Jewish philosophy?” therefore is inescapable, although over the centuries Jewish philosophers have given very different answers to it. For some, Jewish philosophy represents the relentless quest for truth. Although this truth itself may not be particularized, for such individuals, the use of the adjective “Jewish”—as a way to get at this truth—most decidedly is.2 The Bible, the Mishnah, the Talmud, and related Jewish texts and genres are seen to provide particular insights into the more universal claims provided by the universal and totalizing gaze of philosophy. The problem is that these texts are not philosophical on the surface; they must, on the contrary, be interpreted to bring their philosophical insights to light. Within this context exegesis risks becoming eisegesis. Yet others 1 Alexander Altmann once remarked: It would be futile to attempt a presentation of Judaism as a philosophical system, or to speak of Jewish philosophy in the same sense as one speaks of American, English, French, or German philosophy. Judaism is a religion, and the truths it teaches are religious truths. They spring from the source of religious experience, not from pure reason. See Alexander Altmann, “Judaism and World Philosophy,” in The Jews: Their History, Culture, and Religion, ed. Louis Finkelstein (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1949), vol. 2, 954. 2 In this regard, see Norbert M. Samuelson, Jewish Faith and Modern Science: On the Death and Rebirth of Jewish Philosophy (New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 2008), e.g., 10–12.

viii

editors’ introduction to series

eschew the term “philosophy” and instead envisage themselves as working in a decidedly Jewish key in order to articulate or clarify particular issues that have direct bearing on Jewish life and existence.3 Between these two perspectives or orientations, there exist several other related approaches to the topic of Jewish philosophy, which can and have included ethics,4 gender studies,5 multiculturalism,6 and postmodernism.7 Despite their differences in theory and method, what these approaches have in common is that they all represent the complex intersection of Judaism, variously defined, and a set of non-Jewish grids or lenses used to interpret this rich tradition. Framed somewhat differently, Jewish philosophy—whatever it is, however it is defined, or whether it is even possible—represents the collision of particularistic demands and universal concerns. The universal or that which is, in theory, open and accessible to all regardless of race, color, creed, or gender confronts the particular or that which represents the sole concern of a specific group that, by nature or definition, is insular and specific-minded. Because it is concerned with a particular people, the Jews, and how to frame their traditions in a universal and universalizing light that is believed to conform to the dictates of reason, Jewish philosophy can never be about pure thinking, if indeed there ever can be such a phenomenon. Rather Jewish philosophy—from antiquity to the present—always seems to have had and, for the most part continues to have, rather specific and 3 See, e.g., Strauss’s claim about Maimonides’ Guide of the Perplexed, perhaps one of the most important and successful works of something called Jewish philosophy ever written. He claims that one “begins to understand the Guide once one sees that it is not a philosophic book—a book written by a philosopher for philosophers—but a Jewish book: a book written by a Jew for Jews.” See Leo Strauss, “How to Begin to Study The Guide of the Perplexed,” in The Guide of the Perplexed, trans. Shlomo Pines, 2 vols. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963), vol. 1, xiv. Modern iterations of this may be found, for example, in J. David Bleich, Bioethical Dilemmas: A Jewish Perspective, 2 vols. (vol. 1, New York: Ktav, 1998; vol. 2, New York: Targum Press, 2006). 4 See, e.g., David Novak, Natural Law in Judaism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); Elliot Dorff, Love Your Neighbor and Yourself: A Jewish Approach to Modern Personal Ethics (New York: Jewish Publication Society of America, 2006). 5 E.g., the collection of essays in Women and Gender in Jewish Philosophy, ed. Hava Tirosh-Samuelson (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2004). 6 E.g., Jonathan Sacks, The Dignity of Difference: How to Avoid a Clash of Civilizations (London: Continuum, 2003); Jonathan Sacks, To Heal a Fractured World: The Ethics of Responsibility (New York: Schocken, 2007). 7 E.g., Elliot R. Wolfson, Language, Eros, Being: Kabbalistic Hermeneutics and Poetic Imagination (New York: Fordham University Press, 2004); Elliot R. Wolfson, Open Secret: Postmessianic Messianism and the Mystical Revision of Menahem Mendel Schneerson (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009); Elliot R. Wolfson, A Dream Interpreted within a Dream: Oneiropoiesis  and the Prism of Imagination (New York: Zone Books, 2011).



editors’ introduction to series

ix

perhaps even practical concerns in mind. This usually translates into the notion that Judaism—at least the Judaism that Jewish philosophy seeks to articulate—is comprehensible to non-Jews and, framed in our contemporary context, that Judaism has a seat at the table, as it were, when it comes to pressing concerns in the realms of ethics and bioethics. Jewish philosophy, as should already be apparent, is not a disinterested subject matter. It is, on the contrary, heavily invested in matters of Jewish peoplehood and in articulating its aims and objectives. Because of this interest in concrete issues (e.g., ethics, bioethics, medical ethics, feminism) Jewish philosophy—especially contemporary Jewish philosophy— is often constructive as opposed to being simply reflective. Because of this, it would seem to resemble what is customarily called “theology” more than it does philosophy. If philosophy represents the critical and systematic approach to ascertain the truth of a proposition based on rational argumentation, theology is the systematic and rational study of religion and the articulation of the nature of religious truths. The difference between theology and philosophy resides in their object of study. If the latter has “truth,” however we may define this term, as its primary object of focus, the former is concerned with ascertaining religious dogma and belief. They would seem to be, in other words, mutually exclusive endeavors. What we are accustomed to call “Jewish philosophy,” then, is a paradox since it does not—indeed, cannot—engage in truth independent of religious claims. As such, it is unwilling to undo the major claims of Judaism (e.g., covenant, chosenness, revelation), even if it may occasionally redefine such claims.8 So although medieval Jewish thinkers may well gravitate toward the systematic thought of Aristotle and his Arab interpreters and although modern Jewish thinkers may be attracted to the thought of Kant and Heidegger, the ideas of such non-Jewish thinkers are always applied to Jewish ideas and values. Indeed, if they were not, those who engaged in such activities would largely cease to be Jewish philosophers and would instead become just philosophers who just happened to be Jewish (e.g., Henri Bergson, Edmund Husserl, and Karl Popper). Whether in its medieval or modern guise, Jewish philosophy has a tendency to be less philosophical simply for the sake of rational analysis

8 A good example of what we have in mind here is the thought of Maimonides. Although he might well redefine the notion of prophecy, he never abnegates the concept. On Maimonides on prophecy, see Howard Kreisel, Prophecy: The History of an Idea in Medieval Jewish Philosophy (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2001), 148–56.

x

editors’ introduction to series

and more constructive. Many of the volumes that appear in the Library of Contemporary Jewish Philosophers will bear this out. The truths of Judaism are upheld, albeit in often new and original ways. Although Jewish philosophy may well use non-Jewish ideas to articulate its claims, it never produces a vision that ends in the wholesale abandonment of Judaism.9 Even though critics of Jewish philosophy may well argue that philosophy introduces “foreign” wisdom into the heart of Judaism, those we call Jewish philosophers do not perceive themselves to be tainting Judaism, but perfecting it or teasing out its originary meaning.10 The result is that Jewish philosophy is an attempt to produce a particular type of Judaism—one that is in tune with certain principles of rationalism. This rationalism, from the vantage point of the nineteenth century and up to the present, is believed to show Judaism in its best light, as the synthesis or nexus between a Greek-inflected universalism and the particularism of the Jewish tradition. What is the status of philosophy among Jews in the modern period? Since their emancipation in the nineteenth century, Jews have gradually integrated into Western society and culture, including the academy. Ever since the academic study of Judaism began in the 1820s in Germany, Jewish philosophy has grown to become a distinctive academic discourse practiced by philosophers who now often hold positions in non-Jewish institutions of higher learning. The professionalization of Jewish philosophy has not been unproblematic, and Jewish philosophy has had to (and still has to) justify its legitimacy and validity. And even when Jewish philosophy is taught in Jewish institutions (for example, rabbinic seminaries or universities in Israel), it has to defend itself against those Jews who regard philosophy as alien to Judaism, or minimally, as secondary in importance to the inherently Jewish disciplines such as jurisprudence or exegesis. Jewish philosophy, in other words, must still confront the charge that it is not authentically Jewish. The institutional setting for the practice of Jewish philosophy has shaped Jewish philosophy as an academic discourse. But regardless of the   9 This despite the claims of Yitzhak Baer who believed that philosophy had a negative influence on medieval Spanish Jews that made them more likely to convert to Christianity. See Israel Jacob Yuval, “Yitzhak Baer and the Search for Authentic Judaism,” in The Jewish Past Revisited: Reflections on Modern Jewish Historians, ed. David N. Myers and David B. Ruderman (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998), 77–87. 10 Indeed, Jewish philosophers in the medieval period did not even see themselves as introducing foreign ideas into Judaism. Instead they saw philosophical activity as a reclamation of their birthright since the Jews originally developed philosophy before the Greeks and others stole it from them.



editors’ introduction to series

xi

setting, Jewish philosophy as an academic discourse is quite distinct from Jewish philosophy as constructive theology, even though the two may often be produced by the same person. Despite the lack of unanimity about the scope and methodology of Jewish philosophy, the Library of Contemporary Jewish Philosophers insists that Jewish philosophy has thrived in the past half century in ways that will probably seem surprising to most readers. When asked who are the Jewish philosophers of the twentieth century, most would certainly mention the obvious: Franz Rosenzweig (d. 1929), Martin Buber (d. 1965), and Emmanuel Levinas (d. 1995). Some would also be able to name Abraham Joshua Heschel (d. 1972), Mordecai Kaplan (d. 1983), Joseph Soloveitchik (d. 1993), and Hans Jonas (d. 1993). There is no doubt that these thinkers have either reshaped the discourse of Western thought for Jews and nonJews or have inspired profound rethinking of modern Judaism. However, it is misleading to identify contemporary Jewish philosophy solely with these names, all of whom are now deceased. In recent years it has been customary for Jews to think that Jewish philosophy has lost its creative edge or that Jewish philosophy is somehow profoundly irrelevant to Jewish life. Several reasons have given rise to this perception, not the least of which is, ironically enough, the very success of Jewish Studies as an academic discipline. Especially after 1967, Jewish Studies has blossomed in secular universities especially in the North American Diaspora, and Jewish philosophers have expressed their ideas in academic venues that have remained largely inaccessible to the public at large. Moreover, the fact that Jewish philosophers have used technical language and a certain way of argumentation has made their thought increasingly incomprehensible and therefore irrelevant to the public at large. At the same time that the Jewish public has had little interest in professional philosophy, the practitioners of philosophy (especially in Anglo-American departments of philosophy) have denied the philosophical merits of Jewish philosophy as too religious or too particularistic and excluded it entirely. The result is that Jewish philosophy is now largely generated by scholars who teach in departments/programs of Jewish Studies, in departments of Religious Studies, or in Jewish denominational seminaries.11

11 See the comments in Aaron W. Hughes and Elliot R. Wolfson, “Introduction: Charting an Alternative Course for the Study of Jewish Philosophy,” in New Directions in Jewish Philosophy, ed. Aaron W. Hughes and Elliot R. Wolfson (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2010), 1–16.

xii

editors’ introduction to series

The purpose of the Library of Contemporary Jewish Philosophers is not only to dispel misperceptions about Jewish philosophy but also to help nudge the practice of Jewish philosophy out of the ethereal heights of academe to the more practical concerns of living Jewish communities. To the public at large this project documents the diversity, creativity, and richness of Jewish philosophical and intellectual activity during the second half of the twentieth century and early twenty-first century, showing how Jewish thinkers have engaged new topics, themes, and methodologies and raised new philosophical questions. Indeed, Jewish philosophers have been intimately engaged in trying to understand and interpret the momentous changes of the twentieth century for Jews. These have included the Holocaust, the renewal of Jewish political sovereignty, secularism, postmodernism, feminism, and environmentalism. As a result, the Library of Contemporary Jewish Philosophy intentionally defines the scope of Jewish philosophy very broadly so as to engage and include theology, political theory, literary theory, intellectual history, ethics, and feminist theory, among other discourses. We believe that the overly stringent definition of “philosophy” has impoverished the practice of Jewish philosophy, obscuring the creativity and breadth of contemporary Jewish reflections. An accurate and forward looking view of Jewish philosophy must be inclusive. To practitioners of Jewish philosophy this project claims that Jewish philosophical activity cannot and should not remain limited to professional academic pursuits. Rather, Jewish philosophy must be engaged in life as lived in the present by both Jews and non-Jews. Jews are no longer a people apart, instead they are part of the world and they live in this world through conversation with other civilizations and cultures. Jewish philosophy speaks to Jews and to non-Jews, encouraging them to reflect on problems and take a stand on a myriad of issues of grave importance. Jewish philosophy, in other words, is not only alive and well today, it is also of the utmost relevance to Jews and non-Jews. The Library of Contemporary Jewish Philosophers is simultaneously a documentary and an educational project. As a documentary project, it intends to shape the legacy of outstanding thinkers for posterity, identifying their major philosophical ideas and making available their seminal essays, many of which are not easily accessible. A crucial aspect of this is the interview with the philosophers that functions, in many ways, as an oral history. The interview provides very personal comments by each philosopher as he or she reflects about a range of issues that have engaged them over the years. In this regard the Library of Contemporary Jewish



editors’ introduction to series

xiii

Philosophers simultaneously records Jewish philosophical activity and demonstrates its creativity both as a constructive discourse as well as an academic field. As an educational project, the Library of Contemporary Jewish Philosophers is intended to stimulate discussion, reflection, and debate about the meaning of Jewish existence at the dawn of the twenty-first century. The individual volumes and the entire set are intended to be used in a variety of educational settings: college-level courses, programs for adult Jewish learning, rabbinic training, and interreligious dialogues. By engaging or confronting the ideas of these philosophers, we hope that Jews and non-Jews alike will be encouraged to ponder the past, present, and future of Jewish philosophy, reflect on the challenges to and complexities of Jewish existence, and articulate Jewish philosophical responses to these challenges. We hope that, taken as individual volumes and as a collection, the Library of Contemporary Jewish Philosophers will inspire readers to ask philosophical, theological, ethical, and scientific questions that will enrich Jewish intellectual life for the remainder of the twenty-first century. All of the volumes in the Library of Contemporary Jewish Philosophers have the same structure: an intellectual profile of the thinker, several seminal essays by the featured philosopher, an interview with him or her, and a selected bibliography of 120 items, listing books, articles, book chapters, book reviews, and public addresses. As editors of the series we hope that the structure will encourage the reader to engage the volume through reflection, discussion, debate, and dialogue. As the love of wisdom, philosophy is inherently Jewish. Philosophy invites questions, cherishes debate and controversy, and ponders the meaning of life, especially Jewish life. We hope that the Library of Contemporary Jewish Philosophers will stimulate thinking and debate because it is our hope that the more Jews philosophize, the more they will make Judaism deeper, durable, and longlasting. Finally, we invite readers to engage the thinkers featured in these volumes, to challenge and dispute them, so that Judaism will become ever stronger for future generations.

David Novak: An Intellectual Portrait Aaron W. Hughes David Novak’s many works revolve around the intersection of traditional Judaism and the modern world. A central theme that weaves throughout his wide-ranging corpus is how can religious Jews simultaneously exist within the liberal and democratic nation-state yet remain separate from its tradition of secularism. This dialectic of within yet apart has led Novak to reflect upon the place of the non-Jew within Judaism and to develop a Jewish political theology informed by modern demands and traditional sources. As a self-described “Jewish philosophical theologian” and as a publicly engaged Jewish thinker, he seeks to find the ways that the richness of the Jewish tradition can respond to a larger set of pressing social issues. Perhaps not surprisingly his ideas have resonated with religious thinkers within the other Western religious traditions, all of whom share Judaism’s central teachings of creation, revelation, and redemption. More than other contemporary Jewish philosophers, Novak possesses a singular ability to connect with Christian, especially Catholic, theologians and, as we shall see presently, interreligious dialogue becomes another important feature within his work. For much of its premodern history, Jewish philosophy has been interested in and contributed to the realms of metaphysics and ontology. Though he has ontological concerns, Novak’s focus is more on the primacy of political and social issues, especially how they impact Judaism and how the Jewish tradition can, in turn, respond to them. “The most pressing philosophical questions,” to use his own words, “seem to be those of political thought.”1 The result is that his diverse writings maintain an interest in Judaism’s response to the political and legal infrastructures of modern democracy and, concomitantly, the manner wherein traditional Judaism helps us to understand and confront pressing issues in the domain of social ethics such as war, abortion, and stem-cell research. On all of these matters, Novak seeks to ascertain what he calls the authentic Jewish response by providing close examination and analysis of the relevant Jewish sources (namely, the Bible and subsequent rabbinic tradition). The 1 David Novak, Natural Law in Judaism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 192.

2

david novak: an intellectual portrait

result is the unique ability to combine traditional Jewish learning with an understanding of the historical, intellectual, and scientific contexts of the modern multicultural state. Novak holds a PhD in philosophy and has received rabbinic ordination from the Jewish Theological Seminary of America (JTS). Reflecting this, Novak’s work maintains a delicate balance between the intellectual rigor of the Western philosophical tradition and a knowledge of and comfort working within the traditional sources of Judaism. Whereas many of the thinkers examined in the Library of Contemporary Jewish Philosophers are often trained either rabbinically or philosophically, Novak’s rare and impressive vision refuses to sacrifice the standards of one to the other. The result is a complex amalgam between a philosophy of humanity and a theology of covenantal life meant to show both Jews how traditional Judaism can enter the public square and non-Jews how universalism resides at the center of Jewish belief and practice. Because Novak regards political thought as raising the most pressing philosophical issues for Judaism in the contemporary period, he tries to establish an important link between the rabbinic tradition and the modern democratic society, which he contends is the one optimal for both human flourishing in general and Jewish flourishing in particular. It is precisely this context, as we shall see below, that informs his interest in natural law, the social contract, and covenantal rights. Novak does not write as an apologist, someone who seeks to identify such ideas as Jewish inventions or gifts to Western civilization; rather, he seeks to isolate analogous or cognate ideas inherent to the Jewish tradition that can provide what he calls an “authentically Jewish” way both to translate and engage more universal terms and concepts. While many of his discussions on social-ethical topics such as abortion and sexual ethics may strike the reader as conservative, it is important not to overlook the method that informs the argument for the argument itself.2 Indeed his discussion of other issues, most notably health care, puts him on the other side of the political spectrum. It is, thus, important not to dismiss Novak on political grounds. Rather, his analysis is rich and the force of his argument persuasive on these and related social issues, all of which are as controversial as they are pressing. Even if one disagrees with him on certain matters of social ethics, all of his positions are informed 2 This is, for example, the opinion of two of Novak’s students: Randi Rashkover and Martin Kavka, “Introduction,” in Tradition in the Public Square: A David Novak Reader, ed. Randi Rashkover and Martin Kavka (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 2008).



david novak: an intellectual portrait

3

by the same hermeneutic that revolves around Jewish participation in the multicultural world and in formulating a Jewish engagement with and response to science, philosophy, and history. Novak develops an articulate justification of the covenantal relationship, one wherein Jews live up to their obligations while engaging in the world with others who live outside of this community. Between the Scylla of secularism and the Charybdis of isolationism, Novak steers a course that seeks room for Judaism (and religion more generally) in liberal democracies. His is a Judaism that does not exist alone or in isolation, but provides a real and a rational alternative to those who contend that religion has no place within the public sphere. Biography David Novak was born in Chicago, Illinois, on August 19, 1941. He studied Philosophy at the University of Chicago, from which he graduated with an A.B. in 1961. In a biographical statement from his inaugural lecture as the J. Richard and Dorothy Shiff Chair of Jewish Studies at the University of Toronto, he speaks of the dissonance between philosophical study and Jewish learning during his early studies. The issue he raises therein is timeless: according to the philosophers, philosophy has no room for Judaism because it is full of laws and superstitions and, according to traditional Jewish thought, Judaism has no room for the foreign wisdom of philosophy. The attempt to reconcile them is both the aim and task of Jewish Philosophy. The passage is as humorous as it is telling, and is worth quoting at length: We were assigned to write an essay on a section of a book which to this day I still think is the greatest philosophical work ever written, Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics. At the same time, I was actively pursuing my Talmudic studies with a pious and learned rabbi who lived in the neighborhood of the university, although as far as the culture of the university was concerned, he could have been living on Mars. Anyway, in writing my essay for class, dealing with Aristotle’s discussion of justice in the fifth book of the work we were studying, I was struck by certain similarities between what the great philosopher was saying and what some of the great rabbis were saying in the section of the Talmud, the tractate Baba Kama, I was studying with my rabbi. So I decided to incorporate some of the Talmudic material into my essay in philosophy. Well, the reaction of my professor, who himself happened to be, as he put it, “of Jewish origin,” caught me quite unaware. “. . . To be blunt, the examples you brought are from a culture that has no place in the modern

4

david novak: an intellectual portrait university except, perhaps, in a department of anthropology, where primitive practices are observed. This is not a yeshiva!” Somewhat shaken by this encounter as only the young and naïve can be, I went to my rabbi for reassurance. But, in effect, I went, as they say, “from the frying pan into the fire.” My rabbi actually agreed with my professor, but for opposite reasons, of course. For him, too, my bringing the Talmud to the university class was inappropriate. In fact, he quoted a passage of the Talmud to me: ye-lo tehe Torah shlemah shelanu ke-seehah betelah shelakhem, namely, “Let not our perfect Torah be like your idle conversation” (B. Menahot 65b). . . . So for the rest of my university education I kept the Torah in one place and worldly wisdom in another, only relating the two in private thoughts and private conversations, neither with professors nor rabbis, but with the very few traditional students at the university who were studying things like philosophy. It was a lonely life, let me tell you.3

The great majority of Novak’s work, as the chapters in this volume make clear, has been a direct response to this and similar experiences. His career and life work do precisely what traditional Judaism and philosophy told him he ought not to do: to put these two rich intellectual traditions in conversation with one another. This conversation, as his work shows so well, is not simply an intellectual exercise, but an attempt to think through and address contemporary social and ethical concerns—concerns that effect both Jew and non-Jew alike. On the topic of his mentors, Novak has always maintained a strong loyalty to his teachers, in particular the late Leo Strauss at Chicago and the late Abraham Joshua Heschel at the JTS. After graduating from the University of Chicago, Novak enrolled at the JTS, affiliated with the Conservative Movement of Judaism, from which he received his MHL (Master of Hebrew Literature) in 1964 and his rabbinical diploma on June 5, 1966. He subsequently received his PhD in Philosophy from Georgetown University in 1971, with a dissertation entitled “Suicide and Morality in Plato, Aquinas and Kant.”4 From 1966–1989, Novak served as a pulpit rabbi in various locations, and from 1966–69 he also served as the Jewish chaplain to St. Elizabeth’s Hospital in Washington, D.C. During his years of pulpit life, Novak found the time to publish numerous articles, in addition to teaching the odd class at various local colleges and universities (e.g., Oklahoma City University, Old Dominion University, and 3 David Novak, “The Jewish Ethical Tradition in the Modern University,” Journal of Education 180, no. 3 (1998): 21–39, quoted in Rashkover and Kavka, “Introduction,” xi–xii. 4 Subsequently published as David Novak, Suicide and Morality: The Theories of Plato, Aquinas and Kant and Their Relevance for Suicidology (New York: Scholars Studies Press, 1975).



david novak: an intellectual portrait

5

Baruch College of the City University of New York). In 1989, he became the Edgar M. Bronfman Professor of Modern Judaic Studies at the University of Virginia. In 1997 Novak was appointed to the J. Richard and Dorothy Shiff Chair of Jewish Studies at the University of Toronto, where he also serves as professor of Religion and Philosophy. Novak is a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and a fellow of the American Academy for Jewish Research. Beyond the walls of academe, and reflecting his ability to combine academic matters with issues relevant to society, he is a founder, current president, and coordinator of the Panel of Inquiry on Jewish Law of the Union for Traditional Judaism. He is also a founder and current vice president of the Institute on Religion and Public Life and a member of the advisory board of its monthly journal, First Things, an ecumenical journal whose goal “is to advance a religiously informed public philosophy for the ordering of society.”5 Novak, together with Peter Ochs, the late Tikva Frymer-Kensky, and the late Michael Signer wrote a full-page statement that appeared in the Sunday, September 10, 2000, edition of the New York Times. The statement, entitled “Dabru Emet (Speak Truth): A Jewish Statement on Christians and Christianity,”6 included eight theological statements, including “Jews and Christians worship the same God.” Over 160 rabbis signed the statement. Novak explained his rationale for publishing the document: “I want Jewish readers to clearly realize that Christians are not necessarily our enemies. Quite the contrary, they can be very good friends to Jews and Judaism.”7 Natural Law and Noahide Laws It seems safe to say that central to David Novak’s thought is the concept of natural law and how it functions in the Jewish tradition. Natural law, framed generally, holds that our basic moral principles apply to every human being and that, because of their universality, they are accessible to human reason independent of divine revelation. For Novak, however, 5 http://www.firstthings.com/masthead. 6 The full text may be found online at http://www.jcrelations.net/Dabru+Emet+-+A+Je wish+Statement+on+Christians+and+Christianity.2395.0.html?L=3. 7 Neil Rubin, “Rabbis, Scholars Publish ‘Jewish View’ of Christianity,” Jweekly, September 15, 2000, http://www.jweekly.com/article/full/14028/rabbis-scholars-publish-jewishview-of-christianity/.

6

david novak: an intellectual portrait

natural law does not refer to positive, universal moral norms but minimal and universally acknowledged negative conditions necessary for societies to function. It is nothing more than a signifier for human finitude that, in Novak’s view, operates as the very precondition for revelation since it points to the very human “need” for revelation. In fact, we do not, in the “created” order alone, come upon positive enunciations of moral law but rather, once again, negative conditions. While Novak will maintain that natural law is available by way of “reason” and therefore does not require revelation, he also maintains that one will only find articulations of the use or findings of such reason save for how they are expressed within a “tradition.” There is no lingua franca of “reason,” in other words, that can be appealed to outside of “traditions” for Novak. Since Judaism is based on a specific historical revelation and a particularistic tradition, there often exists the assumption that natural law—and, by extension, the conditions that flow from it—is somehow foreign to the tradition. The dangers of such an assumption, however, are manifold. Not only does this assumption deny Judaism universal norms, it also has the potential to deny a common humanity between Jews and non-Jews. Such denials have been made in the past with tremendous repercussions and mass destruction (for example, the Holocaust). For Novak, natural law resides at the center of Judaism. It functions “as the precondition of the covenant,”8 for without it the Israelites would not have been able to recognize that the contents of revelation possess normative value and, instead, would simply have accepted these contents because of the fear of divine punishment. Although the Jewish sources have no term for “natural law,” Novak maintains that Jews and Judaism have maintained a belief in the idea, if not the actual term, for thousands of years in the concept and continual elucidation of the Noahide laws. These laws refer to seven commandments that are binding on all of humanity (the so-called b’nei Noah, or “children of Noah”): the prohibitions against idolatry, murder, theft, sexual immortality, blasphemy, tearing a limb from a living animal, and the positive command to establish courts of law. It is important to be clear that Novak does not understand these laws as universally held in this particular form. Rather the Noahide laws are the expression of the finitude of persons within the context of the Jewish tradition. Novak understands these laws in two ways: first they were directed toward the 8 Novak, Natural Law in Judaism, 185.



david novak: an intellectual portrait

7

Israelites before they received the contents of revelation at Sinai (what he calls “pre-Judaic man”), and secondly they were and still are directed toward non-Jews in whose midst Jews must live (what he refers to as “coJudaic man”). For Novak, The speculative character of rabbinic thought on the issue of the Noahide law, of course, strengthens the case for those who have argued for the case of natural law in Judaism, and who have located natural law primarily in the Noahide laws. For if the Noahide laws have never been a vehicle of real Jewish political power over any other, non-Jewish community, and if these laws are basically imagined (that is, abstracted from generalizations) rather than strictly derived from specific authoritative texts, then what else could they be except the product of speculation? . . . Noahide law functions more as a system of principles than it does an actual body of rules.9

Natural law, Novak argues, never appears as a universal law shared by all. On the contrary, it is only ever articulated in the specific context of the positive law tradition within particular cultures.10 In the case of Judaism, the tradition of natural law is, of course, expressed in and through the Noahide laws, which express the minimal standards necessary for Judaism’s moral justifiability. Novak traces the Noahide laws from their origins in biblical times through to the work of the late-nineteenth-century Hermann Cohen (tracing their development and elaboration in, among others, rabbinic thought, Maimonides, Nahmanides, and Moses Mendelssohn). But Novak’s study is much more than a history of the Noahide laws in Judaism. It is, on the contrary, a deep philosophical reflection on how natural law theory can provide an understanding of Judaism and its relationship to the larger world in which it finds itself. It is, to use his words, “a practical requirement for dealing with the new multicultural political setting most Jews now find themselves in; and it is a theoretical requirement for the development of philosophy within Judaism at a time when the most pressing philosophical questions seem to be those of political thought.”11 Natural law, in other words, is not solely of historical interest. It is what has enabled Judaism to engage other traditions, and this historical precedent is what makes it possible for Jews now to reflect about human community.

  9 Novak, Natural Law in Judaism, 151. See also David Novak, The Image of the Non-Jew in Judaism, 2nd ed., ed. Matthew LaGrone (Oxford: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2011), 227–30. 10 See Novak, Natural Law in Judaism, 188–89. 11  Novak, Natural Law in Judaism, 192.

8

david novak: an intellectual portrait The Social Contract

Novak, as mentioned, is extremely interested in the role that members of faith-based communities—traditional Jews, Christians, Muslims—can play in the modern nation-state. He is particularly critical of the view, held by the likes of John Rawls and his followers, that citizens must check their religion at the door when discussing politics in a public forum. Religion, according to such critics, has no place in the modern democratic nation-state. Arguing against this position leads Novak into a discussion of the very meaning of the social contract, both generally and historically, in order to demonstrate how it can be more fully understood in light of the demands of contemporary multiculturalism. Social contract theory, for those unfamiliar with the term, concerns the agreement, entered into by individuals, that permits them to participate in a democratic polity. The prime motive of entering into such a contract is the desire for protection, which must necessarily entail the surrender of certain personal liberties. The overwhelming majority of social contract theorists write from secularist and liberal positions and, thus, have largely ignored how religious groups both can and should participate in the this contract as religious groups. As a result, most modern secularist arguments for democracy argue, whether implicitly or explicitly, that those who come from traditional cultures need to break their mistrust of the state and overcome their cultural origins if they are to participate fully in society. Novak, in contrast, argues that individuals enter the social contract not from a minimal position of isolation into a more common sociality. Rather, they do so from what he calls a “thicker” communal background (for example, a distinct religious, cultural, or ethnic background) and that this is ultimately what enables them to accept the “thinner” terms of the social contract, something that permits them to live at peace with persons coming from other, equally “thick” backgrounds.12 Novak is interested, then, in providing a Jewish religious justification of a secular democratic order. As with natural law, he does not seek to show that the concept preexists in Judaism, but to show how Jews can actively and honestly engage the democratic society in which they live. He refers to this as the “Jewish social contract”:

12 David Novak, The Jewish Social Contract: An Essay in Political Theory (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005), 10–12.



david novak: an intellectual portrait

9

This engagement is what is “Jewish,” not the social contract itself, which operates among Jews and non-Jews and must, therefore, function in neutral secular space. This engagement is not located in a singular event like that of Exodus-Sinai, which for Jews has cosmic significance and is regularly celebrated whenever Jews faithfully practice the commandments of the Torah. Rather, the engagement is an ongoing process of negotiation and renegotiation among human beings coming from different cultural backgrounds.13

In order to do this, Novak returns to the notion that people come into the social contract from smaller yet distinct socio-religio-ethnic groups. Within these groups, individuals possess a series of pre-political, cultural rights that they possess by virtue of the fact that they are rooted in their original communities. From this, they enter into the social contract which functions as an ongoing agreement that makes it possible for different cultures to transact with one another, justly and peacefully, in common social space. This space, the place wherein civil society is created, does not create its own distinct culture, according to Novak, but rather depends “on the plurality of cultures that in truth precede and transcend the construction of civil society through the social contract.”14 It thrives on multiculturalism, but not of the secular variety that paradoxically seeks a uniformity of culture while celebrating difference. This is what permits Jews (and other traditional cultures) to participate in the public sphere while maintaining their religious and other obligations. One of the mistakes that many Jews have made since the rise of the modern nation-state in the nineteenth century, argues Novak, was that they had to give up their traditional rights and customs to become citizens. He is critical of Moses Mendelssohn, for example, for ceding too much to the secular state for its own good and for the good of Judaism. Although Judaism permits Jews to participate in democracy and although Jews have flourished under this system of governance, Novak reminds us that it is important that Jews not regard democracy as the ultimate fulfillment that Judaism anticipates. Covenantal Rights The idea of providing an alternative to contemporary political issues—an alternative grounded in the traditional sources of Judaism—is a major

13 Ibid., 4. 14 Ibid., 8.

10

david novak: an intellectual portrait

leitmotif that runs throughout Novak’s writings. Within this context, he is particularly concerned that contemporary political discourses involving discussions of rights are impoverished, once again, by their unwillingness to take into consideration traditional religious notions of the individual and of society. To respond to this poverty, he attempts to develop a theory of the individual and society based on Jewish sources and, in the process, to bring them into current political and legal debates about rights and, concomitantly, to bring modern rights discourse as developed in non-Jewish contexts more fully into Jewish thought. Since Jewish sources are not accustomed to address such discourses, Novak again looks to internal and autochthonous discussions of covenant in order to make a set of connections between Jewish and non-Jewish discourses, and between premodern and modern discussions. In his Covenantal Rights: A Study in Jewish Political Theory, for example, Novak presents a theory of rights founded on the relationship between God and the Jewish people, one that both Scripture and the rabbinic tradition constitute as “covenantal.” He argues that such rights—what he calls “covenantal rights”—are rooted in God’s primary rights as creator of the universe and as the elector of a particular community whose members relate to this God as their sovereign. The subsequent rights of individuals and communities flow from God’s covenantal promises, which function as irrevocable entitlements. This Jewish version of covenantal rights presents a sharp contrast to modern notions that tend to divide between Liberal and Conservative approaches. Whereas in the Liberal tradition rights tend to flow above all from individuals, in the modern Conservative traditions the talk is of duties, which tend to take precedence over rights. Novak argues that The philosophical question before us is whether there is some way to avoid—or, better, overcome—the standoff we seem to have between the theocratic principles of the Jewish tradition and the democratic principles of the societies in the world where Jews have survived and flourished . . . The task for Jewish thinkers, conversely, is to formulate a political theory out of the Jewish tradition that recognizes the institution of rights, but that also does not base them on principles that are either un-Jewish or anti-Jewish. In order to do that, we must return to the theocratic principles of the Jewish covenantal system.15

15 David Novak, Covenantal Rights: A Study in Jewish Political Theory (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), 29–30.



david novak: an intellectual portrait

11

Novak seeks to show, in other words, that the divine-human relationship forms the basis of all rights within the Jewish tradition, both of persons and of communities—and that this understanding is what is missing in current discussions among political theorists. As with his thought more generally, Novak seeks to show how the Jewish tradition can “provide an intelligent viewpoint from which not just to follow contemporary interest in rights, and at best to be patronized by most if its proponents, but to judge it and redirect it.”16 Jewish-Christian Dialogue Given the fact that Novak has spent considerable time in conversation with Christian—more particularly, Catholic—thinkers, it should come as little surprise that his work is also about opening dialogue between the two faith communities. We have already witnessed this above in the statement Dabru Emet, which was co-drafted by Novak in 2000. While affirming that there are theological differences between these two religions, the purpose of Dabru Emet is to point out common ground for future conversation and to establish the legitimacy of both Christianity and Christians from the Jewish perspective.17 In addition to Dabru Emet, Novak has written extensively about JewishChristian relations. Not only does he address articulately the necessity for dialogue between these two traditions, as we shall see presently, it should hopefully be clear that his philosophical and theological reflections on the place and role of Judaism in the public square could quite easily appeal to and be applied by traditional Christian (and even Muslim) thinkers. In his Jewish-Christian Dialogue: A Jewish Justification, for example, Novak recognizes the threat of secularism to both traditions. “For secularity has threatened them both quite similarly. A common threat has created a common situation. It is thus inevitable that historically perceptive Jews and Christians should be rediscovering one another.”18 In order to begin this rediscovery and to create a common conversation, Novak must first answer the charges of those opposed to it. These

16 Ibid., 35. 17 It should be stated that many were critical of the statement, believing, among other things, that it understated theological differences between Jews and Christians. 18 David Novak, Jewish-Christian Dialogue: A Jewish Justification (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 9.

12

david novak: an intellectual portrait

include those Jews who want nothing to do with the non-Jewish world (for example, the Haredim); those Jews who hold Christianity as responsible for the Holocaust and other atrocities committed against Jews in the historical record (the overwhelming majority of Jews opposed to such dialogue); and those who contend that “metaphysical discussions of community” (here Novak has in mind Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik) have no place as Jews work and converse with the world at large. Without getting into the details of his response to each group, let us instead focus on Novak’s more general assessment of overcoming difficulties: It is correct to assert that neither Judaism nor Christianity (nor any other religion) can authentically claim the truth as its own original possession. That type of theological arrogance is religiously insufferable. Nevertheless, the doctrine of revelation, which Judaism and Christianity affirm, enables each community to claim that it is uniquely related to the truth, that it has received a revelation of truth from God unlike that of any other community.19

The two issues that threaten such dialogue, according to Novak, are triumphalism and relativism. The former, the notion that one religion sees itself as superior to and thus should triumph over all others, shuts down genuine dialogue, as does its opposite, relativism, which regards all religions as essentially one and the same. According to Novak, If Jewish-Christian dialogue is to be authentic dialogue, and a true expression of Judaism and Christianity, it must be constituted so as to carefully steer a course clear between the Scylla of triumphalism and the Charybdis of relativism. Thinkers in each community must re-search their own respective traditions to constitute the integrity of the other community and not lose the integrity of their own. This task is formidable because this re-search must be quite radical, working its way back to the roots of the tradition and back out into the present and toward the future. Triumphalism and relativism have been more ready options in this endeavor because they are easier.20

As Novak “re-searches” his own tradition—carefully drawing on the classical sources of Judaism in addition to modern Jewish thinkers, such as Franz Rosenzweig—he argues that there is actual justification for a renewed relationship between Judaism and Christianity from within Judaism. Since both traditional Jews and Christians affirm creation as the

19  Ibid., 17. 20 Ibid., 19.



david novak: an intellectual portrait

13

necessary backdrop for their respective revelations, they share a common morality—what Novak calls “theonomous morality”—grounded upon the individual’s relationship to God.21 Following Rosenzweig, whom he calls “the greatest modern Jewish theologian,”22 Novak remarks, “we cannot deny that our appointed tasks in this world are very different and must remain so because the covenant is not the same for both of us.”23 In this, genuine Jewish-Christian dialogue provides a response to the forces of secularism that seek to replace the ground of morality with a host of inauthentic means and ends. The Sanctity of Human Life In addition to—or, perhaps better, supplementing—his concern for the ways in which the classical Jewish sources speak to and within the public square, Novak is interested in how these sources speak to various pressing controversies in medicine. Recent advancements in technology—for example, the use of embryonic stem cells—gives rise to a host of ethical questions because the use of such cells to aid other humans also succeeds in killing the embryo in the process. What might the Jewish response be to such pressing questions? To try and answer such a difficult question, Novak argues that anyone who is committed to the normative Jewish tradition should not accept taking stem cells from a live embryo any more than they could or ought to accept abortion.24 In so doing, he uses philosophy and theology to appreciate the theoretical issues involved and Jewish religious texts to aid him in his decision-making. It is important to note that Novak does not offer a traditional rabbinic responsum, but attempts to use the sources to think through a problem. Reflecting upon abortion, for example, he writes: The only warrant for an abortion is when the fetus—even the embryo— poses a direct threat to the life of the woman in whose body it is now living. Under these circumstances, the abortion is considered to be an act of self-defense by the mother. Surely it is irrational to expect any person to

21  See, for example, ibid., 141–44. 22 Novak, Natural Law in Judaism, 131. 23 Novak, Jewish-Christian Dialogue, 155–56. 24 David Novak, The Sanctity of Human Life (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2007), 29.

14

david novak: an intellectual portrait host somebody else within her own body who, if left there, is very likely to kill her.25

Novak finds evidence for this within the sources of Judaism. The story of Cain and Abel, as filtered through rabbinic sources, for example, reveals that they were both expected to know that they were created in the image of God (tselem Elohim). “An assault on the image,” Novak writes, “is tantamount to an assault on the One whose image has been assaulted.” Although he does not intend his argument to function as an official rabbinic viewpoint that Jews must follow, he is nonetheless aware that his argument has public policy implications. Such reasoning certainly puts Novak on the conservative side of fairly heated political debates: We can hope that our God will influence—in ways mysterious to us—more and more members of society to demand that respect for the inherent human dignity of all human life, at whatever stage of its development, be consistently affirmed and implemented. This hope is part of our belief that whereas reason can discover the justice that ought to be done, only faith leads us to hope that justice will be done.26

Lest it be thought that Novak is simply a conservative thinker, however, it is also worth mentioning that his theological and political reasoning can also lead him to positions that are anything but. When talking about health care, for example, he argues that health care delivery in the United States, wherein those who can pay for it receive it, is fundamentally unjust.27 Novak bases his argument, in part, on Rashi’s critique of the commodification of medical care. It is important to underscore that Novak’s commitment to Jewish sources removes him from the American tradition to connect religious reasoning with a particular party. For Novak, the sanctity and dignity of human life—the former in the image of its creator—takes precedent over politically constituted movements in the contemporary moment. In addressing issues such as abortion, capital punishment, or socialized medicine, Novak does so by recourse to the halakha, what he calls the living Jewish tradition. It is worth noting, as should be clear from this intellectual profile, that although the halakha is the most important element in Jewish ethical deliberation, Novak does not regard it as the only source of such deliberation. In this regard, he

25 Ibid. 26 Ibid., 72. 27 He juxtaposes this with the health care delivery in Canada, of which he is also a citizen, a country that provides care to all of its citizen irrespective of their ability to pay.



david novak: an intellectual portrait

15

puts the halakha in direct conversation with a series of philosophical, scientific, and historical elements. The result is, for him, a Jewish tradition that is in tune with the changing needs, belief, and knowledge of the contemporary situation. Chapters that Follow In the first selection, entitled “Divine Justice/Divine Command,”28 Novak examines the relationship, as the title suggests, between divine justice and divine command. Novak’s comments take place against the backdrop of a conference sponsored by the Society for the Study of Christian Ethics on the topic of “Divine Law/Divine Command: A Question of the Ground of Ethics in the Western Tradition.” The latter two terms, Novak reasons, are often seen to be in apposition to one another. Novak instead wishes to argue that they are not the same. In so doing he situates his own position against those in the Jewish tradition, those who write from a traditional religious perspective, who claim that there is no relationship between divine justice and divine command because Judaism is nothing but divine commandments and that these commandments require no theological grounding. This latter position regards the Torah as a system of laws that require observance because of the simple fact that God has commanded them. Juxtaposed against this position, Novak argues that divine justice is that which functions as the ground of the divine commandments. Informing his argument, as should already be clear to the reader by now, is his rationalist theological understanding. Novak informs us that “we need to know what God has commanded, then to understand why God has so commanded it the way he has, and then to respond justly to those who claim our response to the injustices they have suffered in any realm where we humans have the political power to right wrongs.”29 Following a discussion of the dialogue between God and Abraham over the fate of Sodom and Gomorrah, Novak argues that God makes it known to Abraham, and his prophets, what justice is and how he practices it. God thus becomes the divine exemplar that humans must imitate, not as passive spectators, but as actors who compare their own actions with this divine exemplar.

28 Originally published in Studies in Christian Ethics 23, no. 1 (2010): 6–20. 29 See below, p. 25.

16

david novak: an intellectual portrait

God’s concern for us humans, his unique creation, must “involve an ongoing and intelligent and purposeful relationship” with us. Because of this, God must act in a way that is intelligible to us and that, in turn, enables us humans to imitate.30 Divine justice, in other words, functions as the ground of the divine commandments. The second selection, entitled “Are Philosophical Proofs of the Existence of God Theologically Meaningful?,”31 further seeks to combine the concern of philosophy for certainty with the concern of theology for God. It is this appreciation of the separate spheres of theology and philosophy that enables Novak, as we have seen, to connect Judaism to non-Jewish society and, in the process, to show the latter the universality of justice that informs Jewish practice and belief. In this chapter, Novak seeks to review the traditional proofs for God’s existence in a way that responds to the unease of both philosophers and theologians. Most philosophers are dubious of these proofs because they seek to draw conclusions that they believe to be unsupportable by the premises. Theologians, likewise, are also mistrustful of these proofs because they are ultimately inadequate to convey the richness of the God who presents himself to humans through revelation. Novak, writing as a self-described theologian, seeks to show how the three traditional proofs for God’s existence (the ontological argument, the teleological argument, and the cosmological argument) can be theologically meaningful. However, to be so they must be reinterpreted within the context of theology in such a manner that abandons the claim that they can ever be philosophically convincing. Even though philosophers may well reject the claims of these arguments, this need not rule out the fact that they are and remain theologically meaningful. Novak argues here that these three classical proofs must be understood within the context of revelation, what he calls “modes of presentation” that use philosophical tools to strength theology’s critical function. Straddling the border between theology and philosophy, Novak argues that theologians must use the methods of intelligent inquiry provided by disciplines such as philosophy in order to be more precise and lucid in their understanding of God and his revelation to humankind.

30 See below, p. 30. 31 Originally published in Conservative Judaism 34 (1980): 12–22; and subsequently reprinted in David Novak, Talking with Christians: Musings of a Jewish Theologian (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 2005), 247–59.



david novak: an intellectual portrait

17

In the third selection, “Buber’s Critique of Heidegger,”32 Novak shows both his philosophical and historical acumen. He focuses on Martin Buber’s inaugural lectures at the Hebrew University, delivered shortly after his arrival in Jerusalem in 1938. Buber decided to focus on the question believed to reside at the heart of the German philosophical tradition, one raised by Kant: Was ist der Mensch? (What is man?). It is perhaps not coincidental that 1938, one year before the outbreak of World War II and the atrocities that would subsequently be committed against the Jews of Europe, was also the year that witnessed Kristallnacht and the impotence of European democracies to deal with the threat of Hitler. Against this backdrop, Buber sought to confront philosophically the crisis of humanism and to offer an alternative. Such a program, as Novak points out, could only be possible through a direct confrontation with the thought of Martin Heidegger, the greatest German philosopher still alive in 1938. Novak traces the debate between Buber and Heidegger over the proper interpretation of Kant: By going back to Kant Buber seems to be trying to show that he rather than Heidegger is more authentically rooted in the beginning of modern European thought, specifically modern German philosophy. Buber’s critique of Heidegger becomes nothing less than an historically significant tour de force: the Jewish refugee claiming insight deeper than that of Germany’s leading philosopher on the basis of a greater affinity with Germany’s greatest philosopher!33

Novak shows how the interpretations of Kant—Buber’s or Heidegger’s— offered Europeans a stark choice over the question of “What is man?” at a time of real consequence. Buber’s novelty is to introduce the Eternal Thou into the realm of his humanism. Without this, his I-thou relationship would be little different from Heidegger’s concept of Mitsein (coexistence). Although Buber’s initial critique of Heidegger occurred in 1938, Novak also refers to Buber’s 1951 critique at the end of this chapter. Novak argues that the latter critique, written in the aftermath of the horrors associated with the war, proved Buber correct. Heidegger’s endorsement of Nazism, for Buber and for Novak, was directly informed by his philosophy. Within this context, Novak argues that Buber “enriched philosophy and showed

32 Originally published in Modern Judaism 5, no. 2 (1985): 125–40. 33 See below, p. 58.

18

david novak: an intellectual portrait

the strength of Jewish thought to meet philosophical and historical challenges.”34 In the final selection, “On Human Dignity,”35 Novak seeks to clarify some of the philosophical issues that permeate the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which was formulated in the aftermath of the atrocities of the Second World War, and which represents the first global expression of rights to which all humans are entitled. Drawing on the traditions of Greek philosophy, Jewish theology, and Roman law, Novak seeks to examine how human rights and human dignity relate to one another. All of the aforementioned traditions, writes Novak, share the basic principle that Law does not begin with society, whether those who make the laws or those who enforce them, but with the personal lives of those who are asked to live according to the law. The result is that human dignity can only be effectively affirmed for other human persons by those human persons who are themselves dignified in their attitude and in their actions. Human dignity can only be advanced when those of us who are duty-bound to respect it learn why we have been given this duty at all. For this task, writes Novak, “we need the law to be our teacher, to reward dignity and discourage indignity, and to show us that dignity in ourselves and others contributes greatly to the common good, and that indignity in ourselves and others greatly detracts from the common good.”36

34 See below, p. 69. 35 Originally published in The Quest for a Common Humanity: Human Dignity and Otherness in the Religious Traditions of the Mediterranean, eds. Katell Berthelot and Matthias Morgenstern (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 2011), 271–88. 36 See below, p. 88.

Divine Justice/Divine Command* Divine Justice and Divine Command/Divine Justice or Divine Command? I trust I am not being impertinent by modifying the theme of this year’s Society for the Study of Christian Ethics conference for the topic of my address to you today. Instead of ‘Divine Law/Divine Command’, I have titled my address ‘Divine Justice/Divine Command’ for the following reason. ‘Divine Law/Divine Command’ could mean that the two terms, ‘divine law’ and ‘divine command’, are terms in apposition, thus asserting: divine law is divine command, the two being seen as interchangeable. But I want to argue that for at least one important school of thought within the Jewish tradition, which is the school of thought I have greatest theological affinity with, divine law and divine command are not the same. Nevertheless, since there is another school of thought within our tradition who do see the two to be identical, I cannot claim to be representing to you today the Jewish teaching on this question, but only a Jewish view on it, but a view I don’t think is idiosyncratic. I shall discuss my differences with that other school of thought shortly. One can begin to make the case for the difference between divine justice and divine command philologically. In biblical Hebrew, the most common word for ‘law’—as in the Law rather than a law—is mishpat, which is also the most common word for ‘justice’. The most common word for ‘command’ (or ‘a commandment’) is mitsvah. Thus a mitsvah is a law, a particular positive prescription (‘thou shalt’) or a particular negative proscription (‘thou shalt not’), whereas mishpat is the Law itself or the essence of Law itself, which is justice. A law or even laws is not the same as the Law. Calling mishpat ‘justice’ rather than calling it ‘Law’ makes that difference more apparent and the identification of the two less likely. However, the difference between divine justice and divine commandments is more than a semantic difference; the difference between divine justice and divine command is more deeply conceptual. The conceptual difference between divine justice and divine command is important to bear in mind when addressing the subtheme of this conference: ‘The Ground of Ethics in the Western Tradition’. For if ‘ethics’ is a body of particular norms or commandments—what Jews would call mitsvot (the plural of mitsvah)—then the question of what grounds these * Originally published in Studies in Christian Ethics 23, no. 1 (2010): 6–20.

20

divine justice/divine command

commandments implies something that is more than their sum total but, rather, something that is essentially prior to them, whether these commandments are taken individually or even collectively. What grounds these commandments, as we shall see, are the reasons for which they have been commanded. In rabbinic theology, these ‘reasons of the commandments’ are called taʿamei ha-mitsvot. As we shall see, these reasons could only be God’s reasons inasmuch as they could only be the reasons of the Creator of the world for commanding his human creatures to act on his behalf by instantiating these reasons or ends in that part of God’s world humans have been entitled by God to govern and develop as their cosmic dwelling.1 These reasons of the commandments bespeak the very telos that the practice of the commandments God intends their human subjects to instantiate in the world, tentatively in this human world, and which God will bring to final fruition in the cosmos as world-yet-to-come (olam ha-ba). Yet even here and now, this human part of God’s world is also considered to be the high point of all creation (the apex mundi). ‘Thus says the Lord: Were my covenant not there by day and by night, I would not have set up the structures [huqqot] of heaven and earth’ (Jer. 33:25). Without God’s justice as its ultimate raison d’être, the whole universe no longer has any reason to exist.2 Justice can ground commandments in a way commandments cannot ground justice, unless of course one means that kind of procedural justice, which is the correct human interpretation, application and adjudication of the divine commandments. In this sense of ‘justice’, such procedures are clearly subsequent to the legislation of these laws themselves.3 Yet even here, as we shall see, these human procedures need a divine exemplar to imitate so that they be consistent with the way God legislates his own just law and adjudicates according to it, the law whose application to human affairs has been revealed to humans. Initially, God’s law is revealed to humankind through their appreciation of the demands made upon them by each other to each other because they are the image of God. Thereafter it is the special revelation of the Torah to Israel with the demands God 1 See D. Novak, ‘The Universality of Jewish Ethics’, Journal of Religious Ethics 36 (2008), pp. 198–204. 2 See Babylonian Talmud [hereafter ‘B’]: Pesahim 68b where ‘my covenant’ is interpreted to be God’s covenant with Israel by means of the Torah and its commandments. See also B. Shabbat 88a re Gen. 1:31. 3 ‘Justice’ in this sense is very much like what H. L. A. Hart in his The Concept of Law, 2nd edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), pp. 77–79, called ‘secondary rules’, i.e., the procedures for the application and adjudication according to the ‘primary rules’, ‘which are direct legal imperatives.’



divine justice/divine command

21

makes upon the people Israel directly because the people are elected for an intimate covenantal relationship with God.4 The commandments spoken of by Judaism (and by Christianity and Islam) are divine commandments, that is, commandments given by God to human recipients. The adjective ‘divine’ here refers to the source of the commandments, not to the nature of the commandments themselves. (Only in kabbalistic theology could it be said that the commandments bespeak the nature of God.5) Nevertheless, for the rationalist school of thought with which I have greatest affinity, the source of these commandments is not God’s ‘nature’ (which is unknowable if indeed we can even posit it), nor is it God’s raw will (ratson) taken to be arbitrary and erratic. Instead, the divine source of these commandments is God’s creative wisdom (hokhmah), that is, God’s free, intelligent, transitive action. It is what brings the world into being, orders it, and sustains it in being. And if the Torah and its commandments are also a divine creation (beru’ah), they too are grounded by this divine wisdom, which itself does not seem to be a created entity (ens creatum).6 This divine wisdom might well be termed God’s intelligent creativity. Since God creates by speaking, and speech is only intelligible when structured grammatically (and syntactically), this divine wisdom could be called ‘God’s grammar’.7 That might also be what the rabbis meant when they taught: ‘The Torah speaks in human language’.8 Divine commandments can only be cogently grounded by divine justice. For if divine commandments were grounded by humanly invented justice (which is the only other type of justice we know), the justice of man would be greater than the commandments of God, resulting in the theological absurdity of making man greater than God, the human being the arbiter of the divine. (Much modern liberal theology has made that grave error.9) Only the greater can ground the lesser, not vice versa. Thus 4 See D. Novak, Natural Law in Judaism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 122–48. 5 See Gershom Scholem, On the Kabbalah and its Symbolism, trans. R. Manheim (New York: Schocken Books, 1965), pp. 123–24. 6 See Maimonides, Guide of the Perplexed, 1.65; 3.25. 7 See Ps. 33:9; also Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, 2nd edn, 1.370–73, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (New York: Macmillan, 1953), p. 116. 8 See Abraham Joshua Heschel, Heavenly Torah, trans. G. Tucker (New York and London: Continuum, 2005), pp. 47–49. 9 Even though he would have baulked at being called a ‘theologian’, Emmanuel Levinas, the best known Jewish philosopher in recent years, was very much a member of the school of modern, liberal, Jewish theology when he wrote in his essay, ‘Loving the Torah More Than God’, in Difficult Freedom, trans. S. Hand (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University

22

divine justice/divine command

theological cogency requires that human justice, when it is truly just, only be the correct interpretation, application and adjudication of the divine commandments. When human justice attempts to be the ground of the commandments rather than their consequent, however, it necessarily becomes unjust. Here I am reminded of what T.S. Eliot wrote in his magnificent play about the martyrdom of the Archbishop of Canterbury Thomas à Becket (himself the victim of great injustice), Murder in the Cathedral. There Eliot, at the very end of the play, has the chorus pray: ‘[W]e acknowledge ourselves as type of the common man . . . Who fear the injustice of men less than the justice of God . . . less than we fear the love of God.’10 If I understand him correctly, Eliot is saying that human injustice is what is to be feared, not the justice of God which is to be loved. Indeed, when the just God is loved, human injustice can be better recognised for what it is, and it can be better resisted just as a glimpse of the dawning light of day lets us hope for its eventual victory over the darkness of the night. Divine Justice then Divine Command The question now is how divine commandments are grounded by divine justice, even though there are those in my own Jewish tradition (and I know they have their Christian and Muslim counterparts) who see the relation between divine justice and divine commandments to be otherwise than the former grounding the latter. It is important to look at that other point of view on the subject so as to better and more fairly distinguish ourselves from it. There are those who see no relation at all between divine justice and divine commandments because, for them, Judaism is nothing but divine commandments and these commandments require no theological grounding at all. In this view, the Torah (that is, ‘Judaism’) is nothing but a collection of laws. Ideas, like the idea of divine justice, are in this view simply the subject matter of homiletics or popular apologetics. Accordingly,

Press, 1990), p. 144: ‘[I]t is a protection against the madness of a direct contact with the Sacred that is unmediated by reason. But above all it is a confidence that does not rely on the triumph of any institution, it is the internal evidence of morality supplied by the Torah.’ Cf. Novak, Natural Law in Judaism, pp. 82–89. 10 T. S. Eliot, The Complete Poems and Plays: 1909–1950 (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1971), p. 221.



divine justice/divine command

23

Jewish thinkers need not be concerned with divine justice at all since the commandments of the Torah need no more grounding than the fact that God has commanded them. Why God commanded these commandments is irrelevant.11 Indeed, being concerned with the ideas associated with the divine commandments—like the idea of divine justice—might actually impede one’s obedience of a divine commandment, perhaps even giving one a reason not to obey it.12 As one rabbinic text puts it: ‘The commandments were only given to test human obedience.’13 Or, as another rabbinic text puts it: ‘God’s commandments are nothing but decrees [gezerot].’14 Or, as still another rabbinic text puts it: ‘One is not allowed to argue for them [le-hashheev aleihem].’15 But, in opposition to the modern adherents of this whole approach to the divine commandments, my ‘late revered teacher, Abraham Joshua Heschel, called it ‘pan-halachism’ (halakhah being the talmudic word for ‘law’).16 Parenthetically, it might here be noted that this anti-theological attitude towards divine commandments has an analogue in the anti-metaphysical attitudes found in much of modern philosophical ethics, especially by many contemporary analytic philosophers. Most anti-metaphysical ethical reflection today sees metaphysics, especially the metaphysics that is used to ground morality, to be reducible to theology as ‘God-talk’, which

11 See Midrash Leqah Tov on Num. 19:2, ed. Buber, 119b. This is consistent with the rabbinic view that one must do the commandments whether—or even if ever—one will learn their reasons. See B. Shabbat 88a re Exod. 24:7; and the initial question raised in Rashi’s Commentary on the Torah on Gen. 1:1. 12 See B. Sanhedrin 21b re Deut. 17:17 and 1 Kings 11:4. 13 Midrash Beresheet Rabbah 44.1, ed. Theodor-Albeck, 424–25. Maimondes exaggerated when he dismissed this view as being unusual for the Rabbis (Guide of the Perplexed, 3.26). 14 B. Berakhot 33b and Rashi, s.v. ‘middotav’ alluding to B. Yoma 67b re Lev. 18:4 (where the arguments of the gentiles against at least some of the commandments are not to be answered; cf. Mishnah: Avot 2.14). 15 Sifra: Aharei-Mot, ed. Weiss, 86a re Lev. 18:4. And, even though this theological positivism, in the rabbinic texts just cited, could be confined to those ritual commandments (huqqim) like the dietary injunctions as distinct from the morally relevant commandments (mishpatim), nonetheless, there was a tendency among many commentators, especially medieval anti-rationalists, to assert this theological positivism regarding all the commandments. A modern version of this anti-rationalist theological positivism can be found in Marvin Fox, Interpreting Maimonides (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1990), pp. 124ff. Cf. D. Novak, Jewish Social Ethics (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), pp. 25–29. 16 Abraham Joshua Heschel, God in Search of Man (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Cudahy, 1955), p. 328. See ibid., pp. 320ff. for Heschel’s arguments against what he calls ‘religious behaviorism’.

24

divine justice/divine command

for many modern philosophers is ipso facto a reductio ad absurdum.17 Yet some of us could take that reduction to be high praise for our own theological enterprise, ‘doing theology’ being the way some religious thinkers today engage in metaphysics. In fact, whatever metaphysics is still done today by analytic philosophers, without God being its prime object of concern (in fact, not being of any concern at all), makes it little more than a hypothetical ‘mind game’. And, finally, what is called ‘philosophy of religion’, as done by the few analytic philosophers interested in it today, is decidedly non-metaphysical, hence of little theological interest. Getting back to our topic: About the ‘legalistic’ view represented above, which reduces divine justice to divine commandments, Maimonides (d. 1204), for many the greatest of all the Jewish theologians, wrote: ‘There are people who do not seek for them [the commandments of the Torah] any cause at all, saying that all Laws are consequent upon the will alone. There are also people who say that every commandment and prohibition in these Laws is consequent upon wisdom and aims at some end.’18 Maimonides then presents this latter view as ‘the doctrine of all of us— both of the multitude and of the elite’. In other words, it is the only defensible Jewish position in his judgment. To think of God as a monarch who issues commandments for no other reason than to exercise his authority, without a wise or just teleology informing his lawgiving, is to view God as an irrational tyrant.19 We can only fearfully obey any such tyrant because of his power over us. But could we respectfully obey any such tyrant so lacking in wisdom, and could we lovingly obey any such tyrant who is so malevolent? In fact, as both ancients and moderns have learned about human tyrants, their very imposition of their authority through issuing commandments is usually because of their own psychic deficiencies. The clear manifestation of this psychic deficiency makes us lose respect for any human ruler so emotionally stricken, let alone being able to love him or her. (Doesn’t our contempt

17 Thus the Catholic analytic philosopher, Peter Geach, wrote: ‘Euthyphro’s unswerving fidelity to the divine law would be no less objectionable to modern moral philosophers if he had believed in one God. The main issue is whether a man’s moral code ought to be influenced in this way by beliefs about Divine commands’ (‘The Moral Law and the Law of God’, in P. Helm [ed.], Divine Commands and Morality [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981], p. 166). 18 Guide of the Perplexed, 3.26, trans. S. Pines (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1963), pp. 506–507. 19 Note B. Avodah Zarah 3a: ‘God does not deal despotically [be-tirunia] with his creatures.’



divine justice/divine command

25

of both Hitler and Stalin actually increase now that we know that each man in his own murderous paranoid tyranny was acting out, at the expense of millions of innocent victims, his own unforgettable memory of his brutal, sadistic father?) All the more, such irrationality would cause us to lose our respect of the divine King if we thought of him as the heavenly tyrant, and like any other tyrant being much more hated than loved. Indeed, God’s very divinity would become absurd to us if we thought him to be so deficient so as to be, in the words used by many young people today, ‘on a power trip’. Divine Judgment and Human Judgment How divine justice grounds divine commandments becomes our concern when we are asked to teach the divine commandments and adjudicate cases in which they have been violated, that is, to exercise legal judgment in a community where God’s law is the basic law upon which all human-made law is founded. Here we need to know what God has commanded, then to understand why God has so commanded it the way he has, and then to respond justly to those who claim our just response to the injustices they have suffered in any realm where we humans have the political power to right wrongs (however partially). In fact, in the rabbinic doctrine of the ‘Noahide commandments’, which is the law the Rabbis saw as pertaining to and knowable by all humankind, the first commandment (and the only positive injunction) is the commandment to set up courts of law (dinim).20 Surely, such courts of law are to be set up in response to the demands of the human victims of injustice that justice be done on their behalf. And isn’t God’s commandment for us to seek justice revealed in the claims made upon us by these victims of injustice? And, if these demands are the expression of the human right not to be harmed because humans are the image of God, then isn’t God’s first negative commandment, which is the prohibition of bloodshed violated by Cain, isn’t it heard through the cries of those so violated?21 Thus we might say that the most basic divine commandments are mediated by justifiable human rights claims. All this comes out in one of the most powerful dialogues

20 Tosefta: Avodah Zarah 8.4; B. Sanhedrin 56b re Gen. 2:16 and 18:19. 21 See D. Novak, Covenantal Rights (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), pp. 187–92.

26

divine justice/divine command

recorded in Scripture: the dialogue between God and Abraham over the judgment of the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah. The dialogue begins right after the angels who had been visiting Abraham depart to save Abraham’s nephew Lot and his family from the impending destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah where, despite the fact their citizens were known to be ‘evil and exceedingly sinful against the Lord’ (Gen. 13:13), Lot had chosen to settle there nonetheless. It is in this context that God says, in what seems to be a soliloquy overheard by Abraham: ‘Am I to hide from Abraham what I am about to do? For Abraham is to become a great and substantial nation, and all the nations of the earth will be blessed through him (Gen. 18:17–18).22 It would seem that these other nations will be blessed through Abraham’s people because of this people’s public practice of God’s just law as their communal norm. Thus God continues: ‘It is because I know him that he [Abraham] will command his sons and his household after him to keep the way of the Lord to do [laʿasot] what is right and just [tsedaqah umishpat], and so that the Lord might bring upon Abraham what he [the Lord] has spoken concerning him’ (18:19). But what is it that God has promised Abraham that will cause the gentiles to want to be blessed through his people if not the justice this people are to teach, practice and apply to whomever comes to them for it? This will be God’s greatest blessing to Abraham’s people, but a blessing not confined to them. But how will this people know what God’s just and beneficial law is, and how will that enhance the human world rather than destroy it? How will the people of Israel be able to cause the gentile nations to say, as Moses later tells them the gentiles will say about them: ‘Surely this great nation is a wise [hakham] and insightful [ve-navon] people’ that is, ‘when they [the gentiles] hear all these laws’ (Deut. 4:6)? It would seem that the way Abraham (and his descendants thereafter) is to know God’s law and properly apply it is to understand how God applies it when judging cases that come before God, cases that come before God because the rights that law is enacted to respect have been violated.23 22 See Gen. 12:2 where Abraham (then still having the name ‘Abram’) is commanded ‘to be a blessing [ve-hyeh berakhah]’. 23 Note Oliver O’Donovan, The Desire of the Nations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 247–48: ‘The language of subjective rights (i.e. rights which adhere to a particular subject) has, of course, a perfectly appropriate and necessary place within a discourse founded on law. One’s “right” is the claim on which the law entitles one to demand performance. In such a sense mishpāt may sometimes be translated “a right” in the text of the Hebrew Scriptures.’ See Brian Tierney, The Idea of Natural Rights (Atlanta,



divine justice/divine command

27

This understanding is not just intellectual; it is meant to be intelligently practical. It is to be mimesis. This people are to act by comparing their action with the divine exemplar rather than being mere passive spectators looking at a drama that makes no active claims upon them. They are to imitate, but not emulate, God’s execution of justice whenever and wherever they can do so with at least some positive effect.24 (The final and complete effectiveness of God’s justice will be God’s gracious culmination of human history at the end of days.25) That is why, it seems, God reveals to Abraham not only what he commands to humans, but what he does for humans. God not only commands humans to practise justice, God effects justice for them; and God makes known to prophets like Abraham just how he practises his justice in and for the world. God’s practice of justice in and for the world is, here and elsewhere, God’s response to humans crying for justice to be done on their behalf. Thus God’s ‘doing what is right and just’ is in response to ‘the great cry of [zaʿaqat] Sodom and Gomorrah’ (Gen. 18:20). But whose cry is God hearing by coming to judge the claim upon him this cry is making? It doesn’t seem to be the cry of the powerful citizens of Sodom and Gomorrah, since it is unlikely they have anything to complain about; and even if they did have a complaint, being ‘evil and exceedingly sinful against the Lord’, they would hardly look for succour to the God they have so willingly offended. It seems more likely that they would direct any complaints to their own gods, if in fact they had any. The cry seems to be from the victims of injustice for what has been done to them, not from the practitioners of injustice about whose injustice to them these victims are complaining.26 Even though the sin of the Sodomites is designated as being ‘against the Lord’, rabbinic interpretation took their sins to be primarily if not exclusively crimes of violence against the weaker members of their society;

GA: Scholars Press, 1997), pp. 54–77; Esther D. Reed, The Ethics of Human Rights (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2007), pp. 91–105. 24 For other examples of mitsvot based on divine example rather than on divine precept, see B. Sotah 14a. Here one is urged to imitate the divine mercy shown in God’s treatment of Adam and Eve, Abraham and Isaac. Nevertheless, the mercy (rahamim) humans are commanded to practice (whether by precept or by example) is the justice (tsedeq) the objects of that mercy have a right to expect from them. Hence the duty to give charity (tsedaqah) can be required by law and even legally enforced if not forthcoming voluntarily. See B. Baba Batra 8b. 25 See Obad. 1:21; Zech. 14:9. 26 See B. Sanhedrin 109b; also, Louis Ginzberg, Legends of the Jews, trans. H. Szold (Philadelphia, PA: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1909), vol. 1, pp. 245–57, and notes thereon in ibid., vol. 5, pp. 237–43.

28

divine justice/divine command

and the weakest of all were non-citizens like Lot who had only ‘come to sojourn’ (Gen. 19:9) there, and who didn’t even have the right to complain about the way they were being treated there. Like the persecuted Israelite sojourners in Egypt who ‘cried [va-yizaqu] and their plea [shavʿatam] ascended to God’ (Exod. 2:23), doing something for the persecuted victims of Sodomite violence seems to have been God’s concern in judging the twin cities. ‘Doing what those who revere him want, he [God] will hear their plea [shavʿatam] and save them’ (Ps. 145:19). In the case of the Israelites, God both saved them and punished their Egyptian persecutors. In the case of Sodom and Gomorrah, though, there did not seem to be enough innocent people to warrant saving anybody there. It seems that even the persecuted there were themselves persecutors there. As the English poet W. H. Auden put it: ‘those to whom evil is done do evil in return’.27 But, since there weren’t even ten innocent, decent (let alone righteous) persons in all of the twin cities of Sodom and Gomorrah, there was no chance left for a small remnant to morally regenerate the cities.28 Indeed, if there were any innocent individuals there at all, their only hope would have been to flee the cities as Lot did, thus only saving themselves like Noah did at the time of the Flood.29 Even if most or all of the victims were themselves victimisers, nevertheless, as victims they deserve that justice be done for them, even if that justice could only be their posthumous victory, as it was for Abel whose ‘blood cries [tsoʿaqim] to me [God] from the earth . . . which takes the blood of your brother spilled by your [Cain’s] hand’ (Gen. 4:10–11). Furthermore, notwithstanding the fact that the victimisers are on trial before God, even they deserve a fair trial from God, which means, in the words of the Mishnah, their judge ‘is to be deliberate in judgment [metunim ba-din]’.30 Certainly, Abraham has heard about how God carefully interrogated Cain, the first criminal, who stood on trial before God for the murder of his brother Abel.31 And God himself tells Abraham: ‘I shall now go down and look into this cry’ (Gen. 18:22), which Rashi, the eleventhcentury Franco-Jewish exegete (and the most important of all the medieval Jewish commentators), sees to be exemplary for judges, especially in 27 ‘September 1, 1939’ in A. J. M. Smith (ed.), Seven Centuries of Verse: English and American, 2nd rev. edn (New York: Scribner’s, 1957), p. 686. 28 Gen. 18:32. For ten as the minimum number of persons needed to make up a res publica, see Palestinian Talmud: Berakhot 7.3/11c; B. Megillah 23b. 29 See Gen. 6:22–7:9. 30 Mishnah: Avot 1.1. 31 See Gen. 4:9–15.



divine justice/divine command

29

capital cases, to carefully gather and analyse evidence before coming to a verdict.32 When it comes to actually learning from God’s practice of justice in the world and to thereby imitate it, Abraham runs into a profound dilemma: it seems that God’s justice might be indiscriminate, blind revenge that makes no distinction between the guilty and the innocent. Thus, with much trepidation, Abraham confronts God, asserting: ‘It is unworthy of you [halilah lekha] to do such a thing: to put to death the innocent [tsaddiq] along with the guilty [rasha]! That the innocent and the guilty be alike, that is unworthy of you! Shall the judge [ha-shofet] of all the earth himself not do justice [misphat]?!’ (Gen. 18:25). Now we must ask two questions. One, why must God’s practice of justice in the human world be of such concern to Abraham? Two, what is the real meaning of Abraham’s challenge to God? As to the first question, Abraham’s concern with God’s practice of justice in the human world is because Abraham’s ability to command his clan to ‘keep the way of the Lord’ (Gen. 18:19) depends on ‘doing it’ the way God does it. Thus ‘to keep the way of the Lord [derekh adonai] to do what is right and just’ refers to both God’s doing and man’s doing. Since human action as the action of those unique creatures created in the image of God is to imitate divine action, divine action must be imitable, it must be performed intelligently by God and be intelligible to man. But, if the two most basic juridical opposites—the guilty and the innocent— are treated as if they were one and the same, then God seems to have committed the most basic logical error; God seems to have made logical opposites identical by acting (not just by thinking or speaking) as if A equals not-A. Now, of course, one could say that God can act any way God wants to act, even doing what seems to us to be illogical, which is more problematic than saying God acts ‘mysteriously’, since ‘mystery’ (especially when it is ineffable) does not involve outright contradiction. After all, ‘My plans [mahshevotai] are not your plans, and your ways are not my ways [derakhai] says the Lord’ (Isa. 55:8). Nevertheless, illogical action is not imitable, and it is clear God wants Abraham to imitate his judgmental action in the world whenever and wherever Abraham can do so. Indeed, why else would God have revealed to Abraham what he proposes to do? Here let us remember Wittgenstein’s point about ‘the impossibility of illogical thought’, and that ‘the exploration of logic means the 32 Commentary on the Torah thereon.

30

divine justice/divine command

exploration of everything that is subject to law [Gesetzmässigkeit]. And everything outside logic is accidental.’33 It is ‘the impossibility of illogical thought’, and much more the impossibility of illogical commands, that is at issue here. One cannot be asked to imitate the inimitable. Action that appears illogical or paradoxical does not orient us into active imitation; instead, it disorients us into passive confusion, even evoking ridicule.34 So, if God wants us to actively imitate his justice in the world, God will have to give a rational explanation of how his justice operates as God’s modus operandi. As such, that explanation must not ignore the most elementary of all logical axioms: the principle of non-contradiction. In other words, God’s revealed action must be coherent in order to be cogent. Cognitive dissonance evidenced by God would make an intelligent, coherent human relationship with God impossible. After all, Abraham is not Job, who God seems to have told to accept God’s justice as ‘none of his business’.35 Instead, God seems to regard Abraham’s imitation of his justice, indeed Abraham’s participation in God’s justice, to be very much Abraham’s ‘business’. That is undoubtedly due to Abraham’s having been made God’s covenantal partner when God told him: ‘I have established my covenant between me and you and between your descendants after you for [all] their generations: to be a everlasting covenant [li-vrit olam]’ (Gen. 17:7). In fact, as the Talmud notes, Abraham is the first person who declares God’s kingship to be on earth and not just in heaven; hence furthering God’s royal justice is now inescapable for those so covenanted.36 Indeed, the Talmud considers the practice of judicial justice in the world to be an act of partnership with God having cosmic significance.37 Unlike humans who as creatures had no choice but to be created by their Creator, God as Creator does have a choice whether or not to create any creature, especially whether or not to create God’s human creatures, who as God’s image (tselem elohim or imago Dei) are the object of God’s special and ongoing concern. God could just as easily have not created this world as he did, or God could have created some other world entirely different from this world, a world which like the rest of the universe apart from the earth with its human presence seems to have nothing in 33 Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, 5.4731 and 6.3, trans. D. F. Pears and B. F. McGuiness (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1961), pp. 95, 137. 34 See B. Eruvin 68b. 35 See Job 38:1–40:1. 36 See Sifre: Deuteronomy, no. 313 re Gen. 24:2, ed. Finkelstein, pp. 354–55; also, B. Berakhot 7b re Gen. 15:8. 37 B. Sanhedrin 6b re Ps. 82:1; 2 Chron. 19:6. See Midrash Shemot Rabbah 30.24 re Ps. 12:6.



divine justice/divine command

31

common with God. Or, God could have just as easily have created nothing at all. However, if God’s concern for his unique human creatures entails an ongoing intelligent and purposeful relationship with us humans, then God must act in a way that is intelligible to us as the kind of coherent action we humans could possibly imitate.38 A close analogy might be: Humans as essentially dialogical-communal beings have no choice but to speak to each other. Humans need to do so throughout the time they are in the world with each other. (As Aristotle pointed out, beings who have no need to speak to one another are either beasts or gods.39) And, in order to be understood by the other so that the other can speak back or respond to me, I have to speak intelligently. I must speak logically, my speech must be intelligible in order to be understood and responded to accordingly. That is most necessary when I speak prescriptively, that is, when I ask somebody else to do something, especially asking somebody else to do something with me by responding to me for us together. In terms of speaking and speaking logically, humans have no choice, unless they want to be reduced to the level of babbling by themselves. (Human speech is necessarily communicative as emphasised, mutatis mutandis, by Socrates, Aristotle, Buber, Wittgenstein, and Habermas.) But, whereas God could have chosen not to speak or not to speak to us, even God must speak in a way that is intelligible to us, that is, if God is asking us to act as God is telling us he acts in the world for us. The difference between God and humans is that our necessity to speak logically is entailed by our inescapable need to speak to others, whereas God seems to have no need to speak to others. Indeed, God seems to have no needs at all, since needs imply a lack or emptiness that makes the needy person have to fulfil it. But what could God possibly lack and still be God? So, even God’s necessity to speak and act logically in relation to us does not stem from a finite need but, rather, from infinite divine freedom, which is God’s ability to have a relationship with finite creatures, especially the unique human creatures God has chosen to have something in common with. God could have chosen otherwise or not chosen at all. But we humans do not have the choice (contra Hamlet) to be or not to be the loquacious,

38 See Rémi Brague, The Law of God, trans. L. G. Cochrane (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2007), p. 221. 39 Politics, 1.1/1253a29.

32

divine justice/divine command

social, God-concerned creatures we are by nature. We only have choices as to how to act humanly in the common human world into which we have already been placed by God and into which God comes to covenant with us. (For a biblically based religion like Judaism, to act humanly is to act appropriately as the image of God in the world according to God’s law that commands us exactly how that is to be done.) Unlike humans, God’s logical necessities do not follow from God’s ontological needs since, at least for rationalist Jewish theology anyway, God has no ontological needs, for God is not a ‘being’ who has what we would call a ‘nature’ or ‘essence’.40 Thus God’s necessity is logical, not ontological. Ours is both. Indeed, all we know about God is how God does that which God does for us and with us, not what God is per se. (That is why any talk about God’s ‘nature’ is presumptuous.) That is why our imitation of God is practical, not contemplative. We can know nothing about God’s life aside from God’s relationship with us, a relationship God alone has initiated and sustained by the covenant. Finally, our basic ontological need is metaphysical. It is our need to hear from the wholly transcendent God of his concern for us and that his wise justice grounds the commandments we are given to learn and practise in the world as evidence of God’s ongoing concern for us. As we have seen, God’s justice grounds the divine commandments by giving them their true end, their essential raison d’être. We should look upon Abraham’s challenge to God as a logical rather than as an ontological challenge, for an ontological challenge would presume that Abraham really has a ground upon which to stand against God to accuse God from which Abraham would be self-sufficient enough to face God as an equal. (Recall that ‘being the same as God’—Gen. 3:5— was how the Serpent tempted Eve into disobedience of God.) Thus, with ontological humility, Abraham says: ‘Behold I presume to speak to my lord, even though I am but dust and ashes’ (Gen. 18:27). Yet too many 40 Nevertheless, if God has covenantal needs, i.e., God needs the cooperation of God’s covenantal partners in order to make the covenant work in the world, these are needs God himself has chosen by choosing to be bound by his own covenantal promises (see B. Berakhot 32a re Exod. 32:13). They are unlike our needs, which are ours by natural necessity. Our choice is not to have needs or not—especially our need to be related to God and our fellow humans—they are ours because of our involuntary nature. Our choices are whether or not to fulfill these needs, and how is the best way to fulfill them when we have accepted them. By having a nature or essence, our choices are limited by that nature or essence. But to confine God’s absolute freedom by ‘essentialising’ God is to place a limit where none can be placed (see Ps. 145:3). Concerning the distinction between natural needs and voluntary needs, see D. Novak, The Jewish Social Contract (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005), pp. 179–82.



divine justice/divine command

33

moderns have presumed that when Abraham says: ‘Shall the judge of all the earth not himself do justice [mishpat]?!’, he is holding God up to a standard above God himself, a standard by which Abraham could judge God. And, for many moderns, this standard is one of man’s own making. This standard is unlike the standards invoked by Plato and the Stoics, who saw the gods and then humans to be subordinate to a transcendent cosmic justice.41 Instead, this modern view makes humans ‘the measure of all things’; it even makes humans the judges of divine action by their own invented ‘values’, by their own ‘autonomy’.42 But, contrary to Plato and the Stoics, and even more so contrary to the modern ‘evaluators’, God can only be asked to conform to God’s own autonomous standard. God is only answerable to himself. In the context of God’s covenant with all creation in general, and God’s special covenant with Abraham and his community, God is answerable to God’s own promise, which is, as the Psalmist puts it, ‘to judge the earth, judging the world with justice [be-tsedeq] and the peoples rightly [be-mesharim] (Ps. 98:9); and as the prophet Isaiah says to Israel: ‘I the Lord have called you with justice [be-tsedeq] . . . and I have made you a covenanted people to enlighten nations [l’or goyyim]’ (Isa. 42:6). It is important to remember that when Abraham holds God up to ‘justice’ (mishpat), he is not holding God up to an independent, superior, abstract, metaphysical entity called ‘justice’. Abraham is not Socrates who gets the pious Euthyphro to admit that justice is to be loved because of what it is per se rather than being loveable because the gods love it.43 And Abraham is not Plato who saw his creator god being answerable to a Form higher than himself when creating the cosmos out of primordial chaos.44 For if mishpat were a noun naming an entity (a metaphysical entity, to be sure), and if this entity were a standard to which God is being held up to, the text (Gen. 18:25) would have probably had Abraham say: ‘Shall the judge of all the earth not act according to justice [ka-mishpat]?!’45 So, even though mishpat is literally a noun, it functions in this text as an adverb, something that is not uncommon in biblical Hebrew, which has few adverbs of its own. Therefore, the text could well be translated: ‘Shall

41  See e.g. Cicero, De Legibus, 1.7. 42 Cf. Plato, Theatetus, 152A; Laws, 716C. 43 See Plato, Euthyphro, 10E–11A. 44 See Plato, Timaeus, 29A–C. 45 For the use of ka-mishpat as compliance with a standard that is prior to the act of compliance according to it, see e.g. Exod. 21:31; 2 Chron. 35:13.

34

divine justice/divine command

the judge of all the earth himself not act justly?!’46 In this way, the noun mishpat functions adverbially, namely, it modifies the verb ‘act’ ( yaʿaseh) rather than making the action of the judge conform to a standard of judgment greater than himself. To be sure, God’s mishpat grounds the divine commandments and is, therefore, greater than any one of them or even all of them together. But that mishpat is not greater than God. One could say that this cosmic mishpat is God’s intentional or creative thought. In biblical and rabbinic Hebrew it is frequently called mahshavah.47 It is how God intends his action towards the world. Thus it is God’s method of creative thinking rather than being what God thoughtfully speaks into being, which is a created entity separate from God like the actual commandments of the Torah. Nevertheless, it is still the way God has freely chosen to think intentionally; as such, the thinker is still greater than his method of thinking. The adverbial, modifying, qualifying function of mishpat can be seen in the way the verse ‘Justice, justice [tsedeq tsedeq] you shall pursue’ (Deut. 16:20) is rendered into Greek in the Septuagint and then into Aramaic in one of the Targumim. (Tsedeq and mishpat are often used interchangeably or as terms in apposition.48) In the Septuagint, this verse is rendered ‘Justice [to diakaion] you shall pursue justly [dikaiōs]’. In the Targum ascribed to Jonathan ben Uzziel, we find the same: ‘Justice [din qeshot] you shall pursue justly [bi-qeshot]’. Literally, the word here is ‘in justice’ or ‘with justice’. (Palestinian Aramaic, like biblical Hebrew, has few adverbs.) Nevertheless, this noun and its preposition function adverbially. Seeing this helps us translate the text of Gen. 18:25 as if it were written: ‘Shall the judge of all the earth himself not act with justice [be-mishpat]’, that is, act justly. This connection is also clarifying, since Moses is instructing the people of Israel in the present what God predicted Abraham will instruct ‘his sons and household after him’ (Gen. 18:19) in the future. Like a number

46 Thus the new American-Jewish English translation, The Torah (Philadelphia, PA: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1962), p. 28, reads: ‘Shall not the Judge of all the earth deal justly?’ 47 For mahshavah as practical intention, see B. Kiddushin 40a re Jer. 6:19. It is also predicated of God; see e.g. Isa. 55:8–12; Jer. 29:11. The word mel’akhah designates the tangible result of such mahshavah; see e.g. Exod. 31:3–4; B. Betsah 13b and parallels. It is also predicated of God; see Gen. 2:2–3. 48 See e.g. Isa. 9:6; 33:5; Hos. 2:21.



divine justice/divine command

35

of other exemplary acts of the patriarchs, Abraham’s dialogue with God becomes generalised in the prescription of Moses in Deuteronomy.49 Interpreting Divine Commandments with Divine Justice Finally, the theoretical question of divine justice grounding divine commandments raises some important practical or moral dilemmas. How are the subjects or recipients of the divine commandments to understand those commandments that do not seem to express divine justice but, rather, seem to be commanding injustice? Could it be that at times humans are being commanded to do what is unjust according to any criterion of justice?50 To be sure, this is not of concern to those who see divine commandments being grounded in nothing but the fact that God has commanded them. Indeed, they would have probably advised Abraham to tell God to ‘do what is good in his eyes’ (1 Sam. 3:18) irrespective of how irrational it might be in human eyes. For them, it might be that the more absurd the more divine God’s judgement would be. Fortunately, much if not most Jewish theological reflection has avoided that lack of philosophical concern with fundamental justice. This dilemma becomes most acute, it seems to me, when reflecting on the commandment given to Israel to wipe out the Canaanite inhabi­ tants of the Promised Land indiscriminately. ‘You shall not let any one of them live!’ (Deut. 20:16). To be sure, for the Rabbis, this commandment could not be kept even by the time of the destruction of the First Temple (586 bce), since the Rabbis concluded that none of the ancient peoples (save the Jews as the ‘remnant of Israel’) were intact in situ after the Assyrian invasion and defeat of the Northern kingdom of Israel (Ephraim).51 So, there need be no concern that this commandment will ever have to be put into practice again. Nevertheless, if not a present or even future moral problem for the Jews, it is still an ethical problem. How could God (via Moses) have commanded the total destruction of a whole society? Were there not at least ten righteous persons there? And, even if they were all 49 Note Mishnah: Kiddushin 4.14 re Gen. 26:5: ‘Abraham upheld the Torah even before it was given [to Israel at Sinai], which might mean that Moses knew of the commandments of the Torah from the traditions of what Abraham observed as divine commandments.’ 50 Cf. Tosefta: Sheqalim 2.2 and Sifre: Deuteronomy, no. 79, ed. Finkelstein, 145 re Deut. 6:18. 51 See Mishnah: Yadaim 4.4 re Isa. 10:13.

36

divine justice/divine command

depraved because of their past wicked deeds, couldn’t the contemporary Canaanite generation renounce that ancestral past and re-embrace God’s law, thus avoiding God’s wrath—in this case to be executed by God’s own people—just as the people of Nineveh did upon hearing the Israelite prophet Jonah and thus avoiding the wrath God had in store for them?52 The rabbinic tradition, in several related texts, deals with this great ethical quandary by assuming that this commandment was what Kant would have called a ‘hypothetical imperative’ rather than a ‘categorical imperative’.53 Thus this commandment was taken to be conditional rather than unconditional.54 The Rabbis asserted this conditionality as follows: Before the actual conquest, Joshua, who was to lead in the conquest of the Land, offered the Canaanites the option of making peace with the invading Israelites (rather than warring with them or fleeing the Land) and thereby not only saving themselves from destruction, but also enabling the Canaanites to save their own communal integrity as well.55 Later commentators and jurists assumed that the main feature of these peace terms was the Canaanite acceptance of Noahide law which, as we have seen, is the rabbinic constitution of the moral law that pertains to all humankind and is taken to be knowable by them, hence they are responsible for either keeping it or violating it.56 (In several places, the Torah teaches that the Canaanites deserved to be displaced because of their wickedness and that if the Israelites were no better, they too would deserve similar displacement from the Land if they acted so wickedly.57) As the Talmud puts it when considering inherited guilt and the punishment it seems to entail categorically, descendants are not held responsible for the sins of ancestors, that is, when they renounce their evil patrimony.58 And, although the subsequent rabbinic justification of this commandment seems to be farfetched, it is clear from several texts in the books of Joshua, Judges, Samuel, and Kings that not only didn’t the Israelites displace (let 52 See Jonah 3:1–10. 53 See Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals, ch. 2, trans. H. J. Paton (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1964), p. 88. 54 For the difference between a conditional commandment (mitzvah), which can be avoided when the absence of certain pre-conditional circumstances prevent or even preclude one from doing it, and an unconditional commandment (hovah), which can never be avoided with impunity since it is to be done under any circumstance, see Maimonides, Mishneh Torah: Blessings, 11.2. 55 Palestinian Talmud: Sheviit 6.1/36c. 56 See Maimonides, Mishneh Torah: Kings and their Wars, 6.1 and 4. 57 See Gen. 15:16; Lev. 18:27–28; Deut. 9:4; Lev. 26:32–33; Deut. 28:63–69. 58 See B. Berakhot 7a re Exod. 34:7 and Deut. 24:16.



divine justice/divine command

37

alone destroy) all the Canaanites, they actually did make peace with some Canaanite polities, plus they didn’t persecute individual Canaanites who were living among them and who probably had the protected status of ‘sojourners’ (gerim).59 What the actual terms of these peace agreements were in fact is hard to say, but rabbinic speculation about how their central feature was moral is consistent with prophetic insistence that God judges all the nations by just criteria, the violation of which all humankind is held responsible. ‘The Lord comes to judge the world fairly [be-tsedeq], and peoples faithfully [b’emunato]’ (Ps. 96:13). And humankind is held so responsible because of what is assumed to be innate human knowledge of themselves as the image of God, who can no more violate each other with impunity, who can no more to be violated with ultimate indifference, than the God whose image they are can be violated at all (but only offended).60 Divine justice commands that inviolability, and divine justice responds (in ways only partially known even to prophets) to the plight of victims who have been so violated contrary to that divine justice. The eschatological hope is for the day when that divine justice will be fully and conclusively performed, and that performance will be fully evident to all those who deserve to be alive on that day, ‘when the earth will be filled with knowing the Lord as the waters cover the sea’ (Isa. 11:9), and when ‘everyone will sit under their vine and their fig tree, and no one will terrorize [ayn mahareed] them [anymore]’ (Mic. 4:4).

59 See Josh. 11:19 and 15:10; Judges 1:35–36; 2 Sam. 1:8 and 11:3; 1 Kings 9:20–21. For the protected status of gerim, see Lev. 24:22. 60 See e.g. Deut. 4:25; Jer. 11:17; B. Sanhedrin 27a.

Are Philosophical Proofs of the Existence of God Theologically Meaningful?* Proofs of the existence of God have comprised the border area between philosophy and theology. They combine philosophy’s concern for certainty with theology’s concern for God. However, this border status of the proofs has made them troublesome for both philosophers and theologians. Many philosophers have regarded these proofs as asserting too much, as drawing conclusions unsupported by the premises whence they have been drawn. Many theologians have regarded these proofs as asserting too little, as being inadequate to the richness of God who presents Himself in revelation. Yet despite the efforts of some philosophers to deny the philosophical relevance of this question by making it an issue for dogmatic theology, it has, nevertheless, reappeared in contemporary philosophical discussion.1 On the other hand, despite the efforts of some theologians to deny the theological relevance of this question by making it an issue for scholastic philosophy, it has, nevertheless, reappeared in contemporary theological discourse.2 As a theologian, I shall attempt to show in this paper how the three proofs of the existence of God (ontological, teleological, cosmological), outlined by Immanuel Kant in the Critique of Pure Reason,3 are theologically meaningful statements if one reinterprets them within the context of theology and abandons the hope that they are or can ever be philosophically convincing. In other words, rejection of the philosophical claims made by some of their proponents does not make these statements about God themselves theologically meaningless.

* This essay previously appeared in Conservative Judaism 34 (1980): 12–22 (© the Rabbinical Assembly; reprinted here with permission). It was subsequently reprinted in God in the Teachings of Conservative Judaism, ed. Seymour Siegel and Elliot Gertel (New York: Rabbinical Assembly, 1985) and in David Novak, Talking with Christians: Musings of a Jewish Theologian (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 2005), 247–59. 1 See, e.g., Norman Malcolm, “Anselm’s Ontological Arguments,” in The Existence of God, ed. John Hick (New York: Macmillan, 1964), pp. 48ff. 2 See, e.g., Hick, The Existence of God, pp. 253ff.: Germain Grisez, Beyond the New Theism: A Philosophy of Religion (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1975), pp. 36ff. 3 Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, B612ff; trans. Norman Kemp Smith (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1929).

40

philosophical proofs of the existence of god

I have purposely chosen Kant’s outline of these three proofs for two reasons. First, his outline has become so commonplace that it is quickly recognizable, even though I use it differently than he did. Second, by using his outline of the proofs, I attempt to answer his charge that they have no necessary connection with our understanding of experience. I shall attempt to show that if one takes revelation to be a distinct type of experience, then the three proofs can be constituted as having a necessary connection with that experience: the ontological proof as a condition and the teleological and cosmological proofs as postulates. To borrow from the Psalmist, “The stone which the builders have rejected has become the cornerstone” (Ps. 118:22). The Ontological Argument In order to understand the meaning of a proof of the existence of God, theologically or otherwise, one has to understand what happens when something is “proven.” It would seem that “proof ” is either logical or ontological. Logical proof is essentially formal, that is, it does not refer to real referents but, rather, makes such reference possible. Thus Ludwig Wittgenstein noted, “A proposition that has sense states something [Der sinnvolle Satz sagt etwas aus], which is shown by its proof [Beweis] to be so. In Logic every proposition is the form of a proof.”4 Since proofs of the existence of God all intend a real referent, one cannot classify them as essentially logical. Ontologically, proof is a type of presentation or re-presentation; that is, a method designed to make an entity which is now absent present. It thus constitutes a relation between a knowing subject and a knowable object. The object should determine the method of presentation. As Martin Heidegger well noted, “Every inquiry is a seeking [Suchen]. Every seeking gets guided beforehand by what is sought. Inquiry is a cognizant seeking for an entity both with regard to the fact that it is and with regard to its Being as it is [in seinem Dass-und Sosein].”5

4 Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, 6.1264, trans. D. F. Pears and B. F. McGuinness (London: Routledge, 1961), pp. 130–31 (italics mine). See 2.221, 2.222, 3.142. 5 Heidegger, Being and Time, Introduction, 1.2, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York: Harper & Row, 1962), p. 24 = sein und Zeit, 15th ed. (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1979), p. 5.



philosophical proofs of the existence of god

41

Discovery There are three types of such ontological presentation. The most familiar type of such ontological presentation is empirical discovery. Here an inquiring subject, motivated by curiosity, seeks to discover an object, that is, seeks to make it appear to his senses. Experimentation is the device whereby this discovery is described, that is, made repeatable in public; in a word, proven. It should be clear that this type of presentation is meaningless when applied to the presence of God in revelation. Now some medieval theologians rejected such an empirical approach because it presupposes the corporeality of God, a point they regard as blasphemous.6 However, this is not where elimination of this empirical model of presentation should begin, because the incorporeality of God is an inference from revelation, not a datum of it. Although in the Torah God makes many statements about Himself—for example, “I am the Lord your God” (Exod. 20:2); “I am the first and I am the last” (Isa. 44:6)—nowhere does He declare “I am incorporeal.”7 There is a more convincing theological rejection of this type of presentation, namely, it contradicts the dynamism of the relationship between God and man which is the datum of revelation. It is a contradiction because it makes God the passive object of discovery and man the active discoverer. In the Torah it is God who seeks man, and it is man who either responds or hides. “And the Lord God called to man and He said, ‘Where are you?’” (Gen. 3:9).8 God is thus the seeking subject, man the responding subject, and neither of them is at all passive. Moreover, the moments of the God/man encounter are unpredictable and do not admit of experimental representation. “Do not hide Your presence from me” (Ps. 27:9). Because of this, one should drop the specific term “proof ” when speaking of the religious quest for God. As a mode of ontological presentation it only has meaning in the context of empirical confirmability. The relationship of God and man cannot be constituted in this context. The primary reason for this elimination, then, is not the metaphysical

6 See Maimonides, Guide of the Perplexed, 1.55. 7 For this reason Maimonides’ chief theological critic, Abraham ben David Posquières, refused to accept his designation of anyone who believed in the incorporeality of God as a heretic. See gloss to Mishneh Torah: Repentance 3.7. 8 See Abraham Joshua Heschel, Man Is Not Alone: A Philosophy of Religion (New York: Jewish Publication Society, 1951), pp. 125ff.

42

philosophical proofs of the existence of god

inference that God is incorporeal but, rather, the phenomenological insight that objective passivity cannot be constituted as an essential component of this relationship. Also, both the freedom of God and the freedom of man make the moments of mutual encounter unpredictable events.9 One relates differently to God than one does to the world. The purely aesthetic appreciation of nature, which is the beginning of scientific observation, is not the beginning of man’s response to the revelation of God. Invention The Torah itself explicitly rejects from the God/man relationship the second type of ontological presentation, namely, invention. In this type of presentation man qua homo faber invents a thing for his own use. The criterion of invention is pragmatic. However, not only can man not invent God, he cannot even invent the method whereby God’s presence can be controlled or conjured up. Thus the same logic which is used to reject idolatry, as the substitution of something else for God, is used to reject any attempts to make God’s presence controllable by human technē. “Behold, the very heavens do not contain You; can this house which I have built?” (1 Kings 8:27). Personal Communion It is in the context of the third type of ontological presentation, namely, personal communion, that talk of the God/man relationship is meaningful. In this type of presentation the primary data are persons rather than objects or things, as in the first and second types of presentation respectively. The inappropriate features of the first two types of presentation, namely, passivity, predictability, and manipulation, are absent from this type. Neither God nor man is passive. Their encounters are surprises to man, and although God commands man, that very commandment carries with it a recognition of human freedom and responsibility. In the context 9 My late revered teacher, Prof. Abraham Joshua Heschel, wrote, “An event is a happening that cannot be reduced to a part of a process. It is something we can neither predict nor fully explain. . . . The belief in revelation claims explicitly . . . that a voice of God enters the world which pleads with man to do His will.” God in Search of Man: A Philosophy of Judaism (New York: Farrar, Straus & Cudahy, 1955), p. 210.



philosophical proofs of the existence of god

43

of the covenant and the commandments it entails, God does not manipulate man as a thing.10 Furthermore, although the direct confrontations between God and man are unpredictable events, they are not amorphous. They have a structure, and that structure is normative. God’s revelation to man makes demands. “I am the Lord your God who brought you out of the land of Egypt . . . you shall have no other gods in My presence” (Exod. 20:2–3).11 Moreover, man is given the right to insist that God’s authority not function in a capricious, unjust way. “Shall the judge of the whole earth not do justice?” (Gen. 18:25). Now, this being the case, the type of certainty sought in the philosophical proofs of the existence of God is to be found in a satisfactory constitution of God’s commanding presence rather than in the constitution of His intelligibility or His accommodation to human technē.12 At this point we can see how the so-called ontological argument is the necessary condition for the constitution of the authority of God. This argument—if it can be called that anymore than a “proof ”—was presented most famously by Anselm, Archbishop of Canterbury, in the form of a prayer. That fact in and of itself should force us to abandon once and for all the designation “proof ” or even “argument” for Anselm’s quest. Any proof or argument that presupposes what it is trying to prove is nonsense. Note what Anselm states, “And so, Lord, may You who give understanding to faith, give me, so far as You know it to be profitable, to understand that You are as we believe. . . . And, indeed we believe that You are a being than which nothing greater can be conceived (aliquid quo maius nihil cogitari non potest).”13 Thus we see that the ultimate greatness of God is already accepted by faith’s positive response to God’s revelation. Understanding then is insight into the necessary conditions of faith. The most necessary condition of faith is that there is no authority beyond God. This ontological condition can only be seen in the direct relationship between God and man in which faith is man’s participation. Therefore, at this direct level it would be inappropriate to refer to any other relationship 10 Maimonides, Mishneh Torah: Repentance 5.4. 11  See David Novak, Law and Theology in Judaism, vol. I (New York: KTAV, 1974), pp. 136ff. 12 See Emil Fackenheim, God’s Presence in History (New York: New York University Press, 1970), pp. 14–19. 13 Proslogion, chap. 2, trans. S. N. Deane, in The Ontological Argument, ed. Alvin Plantinga (Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Books, 1965), pp. 3–4 = Opera Omnia 1 (Seccovi: n.p., 1938), p. 101.

44

philosophical proofs of the existence of god

in which either God or man is involved, for reference to any other relationship would bring mediation into that relationship between God and man which is unmediated. Thus, both the teleological argument, which sees God’s presence through the value of the world, and the cosmological argument, which sees God’s presence through the structure of the world, must constitute the world before constituting the relationship between God and man.14 That is why Anselm cannot formulate an approach to God which simply reiterates what philosophers have stated before outside the context of revelation and faith. The methodological rigor of his approach might well be philosophical, but the formulation itself must be theological to be authentic. As a theologian, I can appreciate Anselm’s insight better when comparing it with the too easy identification of the philosophical and theological quests made by Thomas Aquinas. Thomas Aquinas, at the beginning of his Summa Theologiae, presented five proofs of the existence of God, all based on inferences from our experience of the world. After each of these proofs, he added a remark like, “And this is what we say is God. . . .”15 However, are any of the five proofs that Aquinas brings truly descriptive of the God to whom the faithful respond? Is not this relationship with God direct because of revelation? In all five proofs, conversely, all of which have philosophical antecedents, the apprehension of God’s presence is necessarily subsequent to the constitution of the world. Thus the world mediates between God and man. But revelation, as God’s direct presentation to man, must be constituted before God’s relationship with man through the world, or His relation to the world itself. If this is not the case, then man’s relation to the world will compete with revelation. Either revelation will become an act of knowing in the world, that is, a form of worldly wisdom, or the world will disappear in the face of some sort of unio mystica of God and man. Neither alternative, although having its respective adherents in the history of theology (Jewish, Christian, and Islamic), is based on the Torah. Concerning the uniqueness of man’s apprehension of God in revelation we read, “Has a people ever heard the voice of God speaking from the midst of fire as you have heard and lived?” (Deut. 4:33). Concerning the reality of the world we read, “Thus says the Lord: the heaven is My throne and the earth My footstool . . . all of these things My 14 “In arguments for the existence of God the world is given and God is sought. Some characteristics of the world make the conclusion ‘God’ necessary. God is derived from the world.” Paul Tillich, Systematic Theology, vol. 1 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1951), p. 205. 15 Summa Theologiae 1, q. 2, a. 3. Cf. Summa Contra, Gentiles, 1.13.



philosophical proofs of the existence of god

45

hand has made and all of these things have come to be . . .” (Isa. 66:1–2). Anselm’s approach, unlike that of Aquinas, avoids these inevitable theological dilemmas. The theological meaning of Anselm’s ontological presentation was best brought out by Karl Barth: “All that the formula says about this object is, as far as I can see, this one thing, this one negative: nothing greater than it can be imagined that in any respect whatsoever could or would outdo it . . . It remains to be said: We are dealing with a concept of strict noetic content which Anselm describes here as a concept of God.”16 In other words, Anselm is saying that given the revealed God who is affirmed by faith, such an affirmation, involving as it does man’s total commitment, is inconceivable if man does not immediately deny the possibility that anything greater than He can be conceived. Thus the ontological interpretation of God’s revealed presence is essentially a via negativa, that is, it negates anything that could be presented as a competitor with God’s greatness. It would seem that the religious doctrine of creatio ex nihilo begins to become intelligible in the context of the theological statement of the ontological argument. The doctrine of creatio ex nihilo should not be confused with the cosmological argument. This latter argument (as we shall soon see) infers a Supreme Orderer from the structure of the world. The doctrine of creatio ex nihilo, however, is much more radical. Whereas a Supreme Orderer can be immanent in the world, a Creator ex nihilo transcends the world. Thus, if man attempts to religiously constitute the world before his relationship with God, the world becomes nothing; it has no real independence (ex nihilo nihil fit).17 Thus the world can in no way compete with the greatness of God, which is the exact point made by the theological statement of the ontological argument.18 16 Anselm: Fides Quarens Intellectum, trans. I. W. Robertson (London: SCM Press, 1960), p. 117 n. 24. For the Augustinian background of this approach, see David Novak, “The Origin and Meaning of Credere ut Intelligam in Augustinian Theology,” Journal of Religious Studies, 6.2–7.1 (Fall 1978/Spring 1979): 43–45. 17 For precisely this reason, viz., the denial of the “Selbstaendigkeit” of the world. JeanPaul Sartre rejects this doctrine. See Being and Nothingness, trans. Hazel Barnes (New York: Philosophical Library, 1965), p. lxiv. 18 In his “Notes on Proofs of the Existence of God” (Hebrew Union College Annual, vol. 1 [1924]: 185–86), the lace Prof. H. A. Wolfson viewed the cosmological argument as a philosophical version of Gen. 1:1. However, the doctrine of creatio ex nihilo, which subsequent theology saw in Gen. 1:1, seems to be a theological version of the ontological argument because it states more about God than the mere cosmological assertion that He made the world. See also L. Gilkey, Maker of Heaven and Earth (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1959), pp. 41ff.

46

philosophical proofs of the existence of god

Anselm is not altogether explicit about what he means by the greatness of God. However, if I am correct about revelation providing the only meaningful context for such statements, then we can only understand God’s greatness normatively, namely, no authority surpasses (or equals) or is able to surpass (or equal) the authority of God. Talk of God’s greatness as the Maker of the natural order or the value of the world is certainly to be found in the Torah. “The heavens declare the glory of God, and the firmament tells of the work of His hands” (Ps. 19:2). “He opens His hand, satisfying every living being with favor” (Ps. 145:16). Nevertheless, God’s existence is not inferred from these observations but is, rather, presupposed by them. It is the prior normative relationship with God that makes these observations possible. “Who is for me in heaven besides You? I have none upon earth . . . the nearness of God is my good” (Ps. 73:25, 28). Man might admire God through vision of His handiwork, he might appreciate God through use of His bounty, but his direct relationship with God is first and foremost his obedience to His commandments, which are authoritative because of God’s most intimate and concerned knowledge of man and his needs.19 “And God saw the children of Israel and God knew” (Exod. 2:25). Understanding God’s causality is secondary to understanding His revealed authority. The covenant, not nature, is the context of this relationship. And, whereas in theologies not based on revelation nature includes both God and man and is thus prior to them, in theologies based on revelation the covenant is what comprises the relationship between God and man and gives it duration.20 The covenant is thus subsequent to them both. The use of the “ontological interpretation,” as I now prefer to call it, is the initial part of theology’s critical function, an area where philosophical method is still the most important ancilla theologiae. Theological inquiry must deepen its understanding of the meaning of faith’s assertions about the God/man relationship. On the a priori level it must understand what conditions are required for these assertions to have meaning. On this level philosophy functions methodologically, offering no independent religious assertions of its own, because it has no realm of independent experience. It would seem, then, that both the analytical and the phenomenological 19 See David Novak, Law and Theology in Judaism, vol. 2 (New York: KTAV, 1976), pp. 20–22. 20 See, e.g, A. N. Whitehead, Process and Reality (New York: Free Press, 1969), pp. 286, 410. Cf. Aristotle, Metaphysics, 1015a15.



philosophical proofs of the existence of god

47

philosophical approaches offer the theologian invaluable critical tools he or she should neither neglect nor overestimate. The Teleological Argument In reinterpreting the ontological argument, we have seen that the constitution of the direct God/man relationship must not be subsequent to the constitution of either God’s relation to the world or man’s relation to the world. However, these relations are themselves components in revelation, as we have just seen, and must, therefore, be adequately constituted by philosophically critical theology. Understanding their apodictic sequence enables this constitution to be successful. Man relates to the world as either a realm of things (culture) or a realm of objects (nature). The former realm is constituted technologically, the latter scientifically. If interpersonal relationships are primary in the development of human consciousness, or, theologically speaking, if man’s covenantal status is primary, then it would seem that man’s consciousness first extends into the world of things before it extends into the world of objects. Things are defined in terms of their personal value.21 Man qua homo faber relates to the world as a realm of things either in his use or as something potentially ready for such use. The philosophical version of the teleological argument infers from man’s experience of the usefulness of the world the conclusion that the world has been so ordered by a supernatural benevolent Intelligence. It is not the crude anthropocentric notion that the world is made for man but, rather, that man can fulfill his values because he exists in a valuable world.22 Teleology provides the ontological context for the concept of value.23 The theologian cannot accept this argument as primarily descriptive of the God/man relationship because it constitutes a fundamental mediator between man and God. However, once the direct God/man relationship in revelation is adequately constituted, this teleological assertion becomes

21 A philosophical parallel to this scheme might be found in Heidegger’s discussion of “Zuhanden” and “Vorhanden” in Being and Time, 1.3.16, pp. 102–6. 22 See Maimonides, Guide of the Perplexed, 3.13. Cf. Saadiah Gaon, The Book of Beliefs and Opinions, chap. 4. 23 “The chief points of the physico-theological proof are as follows: (1) In the world we everywhere find dear signs of an order in accordance with a determinate purpose . . .” Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, B654, trans. Smith, p. 521.

48

philosophical proofs of the existence of god

an important postulate of that relationship. For we can now reinterpret this assertion to state that God’s relation to the world and man’s relation to the world must complement the covenant and not mitigate against it. If man’s technological relation to the world is not for the sake of the covenant, then his dominion over the world will inevitably lead to disobedience of God. “And you will say in your heart: my strength and the might of my hand have made for me all this wealth” (Deut. 8:17). Therefore, man must include all the results of his labor in the relationship with God. This would explain the importance of sacrifice in the act of worship. This emphasis requires that man look upon his technological success as caused by God for the sake of the covenant: “And you shall remember the Lord your God, that it is He who gives you strength to make wealth in order to uphold His covenant” (Deut. 8:18). This recognition is a postulate of the primary relationship we have been discussing all along. As Kant noted, “Postulates are not theoretical dogmas but presuppositions of necessarily practical import.”24 In our case here we are required to affirm God’s benevolent causality because without such an affirmation man’s practical relation to the world of things would continually conflict with his obedience to God’s commandments. The world on the practical level must be viewed as the product of God’s providence. This affirmation enables us to see biblical promises of tangible values not as quid pro quo rewards but, rather, as the necessary certitude that God will allow the things of the world to be included in the covenant by being useful for man’s obedience to God. Thus the twelfth-century Jewish theologian Maimonides wrote, “We have been assured in the Torah that if we observe it in joy . . . that He will remove from us all those things which prevent us from observing it, such as sickness, war, famine and the like.”25 In other words, the Torah is not viewed as the means to the end of technological success with the world but, rather, the world is now looked upon as the means for man to observe the Torah with full physical, mental, and emotional attention. The Torah is not for the sake of the world, but the world is for the sake of the Torah.

24 Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, 1.2.6, trans. Lewis White Beck (New York: Liberal Arts Press, 1956), p. 137. 25 Mishneh Torah: Repentance 9.1.



philosophical proofs of the existence of god

49

The teleological argument is helpful in formulating this postulate of revelation because it is the result of viewing the world as valuable. The reformulation of this argument constitutes God’s relation to this valuable world in a way that permits an ontological foundation for man’s practical use of the world in his covenantal response to God. This is exactly how the postulates of pure practical reason functioned for Kant. The logic is the same, but the fundamental practical reality is essentially different, for covenantal man is essentially different from morally autonomous man.26 However, in both systems human praxis requires the cooperation of the non-human world. The cooperation is first required so that man qua covenantal participant and man qua homo faber do not mutually exclude each other, thus making for a paralyzing human tension. The Cosmological Argument The cosmological argument states that the world requires a first cause. Kant saw it as the ontological argument in inverse order.27 In other words, whereas the ontological argument moves from the concept of a Supreme Being (ens realissimum) to absolute existence in relation to contingent existence, the cosmological argument moves from the experience of the contingent existence of the world (a contingentia mundi) to the concept of a Supreme Being and His absolute existence. However, what Kant failed to realize is that the cosmological argument as presented by such philosophers as Aristotle and Aquinas presupposes that we are already experiencing the world as ordered in some sort of linear hierarchy.28 Without this presupposition the search for a first cause makes no sense because causality, as opposed to creation, is constituted serially, that is, as a process rather than an event. For the theologian creatio ex nihilo is an event rather than a process. Now, if, as we have seen earlier, the ontological argument 26 For the use of postulates in theology à la Kant, see David Novak, Suicide and Morality: The Theories of Plato, Aquinas, and Kant and Their Relevance for Suicidology (New York: Scholars Studies Press, 1975), pp. 126–27. 27 “The procedure of the cosmological proofs is artfully designed to enable us to escape having to prove the existence of a necessary being a priori through mere concepts. . . . Accordingly, we take as the starting-point of our inference an actual existence (an experience in general), and advance, in such manner as we can, to some absolutely necessary condition of this existence.” Critique of Pure Reason, B638, p. 512. 28 Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, 1, q. 2, a. 3. Cf. Summa Contra Gentiles, 1.13. See also Aristotle, Physics, 241b24ff.; Metaphysics, 1072a25ff.

50

philosophical proofs of the existence of god

really expresses God’s radical transcendence of the world, which is the meaning of the doctrine of creatio ex nihilo, then the cosmological argument is not reducible to the ontological argument. A Creator is essentially different from a First Cause.29 This observation does not, however, make the cosmological argument any more convincing philosophically because one can argue whether our experience of a structured world in and of itself requires such a remote first cause, or, indeed, a concept of linear causality at all.30 Theological interest in the cosmological argument is motivated by an opposite concern than that which motivated its interest in the teleological argument. Interest in the teleological argument was motivated by a concern to constitute the world of things as immanent in the God/man relationship. This is where teleology is crucial. For if the end of human life is to be obedient to God, then the end of the world under man’s actual or potential control is to function as the physical means which intends a state of active being included in that end; that is, it is immanent.31 The cosmological argument, on the other hand, constitutes the world as transcendent to man. It views the causal structure of the world as essentially independent of actual or potential human use. It does not assign any purpose to the causal structure of the world. That structure simply depends on a process of efficient causality of which God is the first member. Man’s presence in that world is wholly irrelevant. Man’s relation to the world of objects, motivated by his curiosity, is impersonal. He attempts to view it as it is, making his own subjective viewing as inconspicuous as possible. This interest follows from man’s recognition of his finitude, for his recognition of the world of objects, which essentially transcends the interpersonal realm, saves him from the dangerous illusion of anthropocentricity. The natural world of objects reminds man of his essential limitation by showing an order far more complex and impressive than the world of man’s own making. Nature transcends culture. For theology such a recognition of the transcendence of nature is expressed by the constant reminder to man that God’s presence is not limited to His covenant with man. The relationship between them is not a symbiosis. As such man sees nature as a realm subject to a divine authority in which he

29 See Maimonides, Guide of the Perplexed, 1.69. 30 See Bertrand Russell, Mysticism and Logic (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1957), p. 201. 31  See Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 1098bio-15.



philosophical proofs of the existence of god

51

is not a participant but only a spectator. Both man and nature are subject to God’s authority, but they are subject to it in radically different ways. Thus nature is not in essence simply a potential field waiting for man’s technological control. On the other hand, because man is covenantally related to God, nature is not the medium of that relationship. Man is a participant in the covenant before he can admire God through viewing nature. Nevertheless, this very respect for the inner structure of nature reminds man that he cannot reduce God’s presence to his own limited experience of it. “Then the Lord answered Job out of the whirlwind, saying . . . I will question you and you may inform Me. Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth? Tell me if you have any understanding” (Job 38:1, 3). This theological use of the cosmological interpretation saves man’s relation to the created order of nature from becoming either anthropocentric or cosmocentric. As such it performs a necessary philosophical service for theology. Conclusion The classical proofs of the existence of God are theologically meaningful if they are understood as statements of the ontological conditions and postulates of revelation. By not having their meaning constituted outside the realm of revelation, the “proofs,” now regarded as modes of presentation, strengthen theology’s critical function with philosophical tools. At the beginning of this paper I delineated three types of ontological presentation: personal communion, invention, and discovery. We can now see how the three quests which motivated these three respective types of presentation reappear in the modes of divine presentation. The quest for personal communion is the motivation for the ontological mode; the quest for value (invention) is the motivation for the teleological mode; the quest for structure (discovery) is the motivation for the cosmological mode. A philosophically critical theology can constitute these respective modes of presentation in an apodictic order within the context of revelation. We can thus see a working relation between theology and philosophy which, at least from the vantage point of theology, is most fruitful. It would seem that the type of philosophy which lends itself to such a relation is either of the analytical or the phenomenological variety. Philosophers of these schools, even if not interested in theological inquiry

52

philosophical proofs of the existence of god

into revelation, should nevertheless be pleased at the widening range of applicability of their methods. Theologians should be grateful for methods of intelligent inquiry which enable them to be more precise and lucid in their understanding of the Word of God: of what it presupposes and what it implies.32

32 A similarly motivated approach can be seen in the following excerpt from the 1965 essay The Lonely Man of Faith (New York: Doubleday, 1992) by the contemporary Jewish theologian Dr. Joseph B. Soloveitchik: “While one may speak of the cosmic confrontation of man and God as an experiential reality, it is hard to speak of a cosmological experience. When God is apprehended in reality it is an experience; when God is comprehended through reality it is just an intellectual performance. . . . The trouble with all rational demonstrations of the existence of God, with which the history of philosophy abounds, consists in their being exactly what they were meant to be by those who formulated them: abstract logical demonstrations divorced from the living primal experiences in which these demonstrations are rooted. For instance, the cosmic experience was transformed into a cosmological proof, the ontic experience into an ontological proof. . . . The most elementary existential awareness as a subjective ‘I exist’ and an objective ‘the world around me exists’ awareness is unattainable as long as the ultimate reality of God is not part of this awareness” (pp. 51–52 n. 1).

BUBER’S CRITIQUE OF HEIDEGGER* Introduction In 1938 Martin Buber, the best known Jewish thinker in Europe, left Germany to settle in Jerusalem. Although he came to assume the newly established chair in social philosophy at the Hebrew University, considering the time and the places involved, this was obviously a far more significant journey. Indeed, it was nothing less than the odyssey from a society in the process of totally eliminating him and his people to a society being built by his own people as both a physical and spiritual alternative. As such, it was a conscious break with European civilization, which for most Jews meant its Germanic manifestation, for the sake of a civilization where Jews were taking upon themselves the opportunity and the responsibility of speaking to the modern world on their own terms and in their own language.1 As a lifelong Zionist, the sixty year old Buber did not have to belatedly accept the reality of the Jewish nation as was the case with many other Jews who left Germany for Palestine at that time. As a European philosopher, one whose philosophy had theretofore been expressed in masterful German prose, his spiritual journey to Jerusalem, however, did involve a profound reexamination of those German philosophers whose problematic he understood to be his own as well, and whose intellectual equal he no doubt felt himself to be. In his inaugural lectures at the Hebrew University, delivered shortly after his arrival in Jerusalem, Buber dealt with the question which he believed to lie at the very heart of the German philosophical tradition, the question raised by Kant, still the most important philosopher in that tradition, the question: was ist der Mensch? (what is man?).2 Although Buber’s *  Originally published in Modern Judaism 5, no. 2 (1985): 125–40. The author wishes to thank Dr. Michael Riff, the Librarian of the Leo Baeck Institute, New York, for his help in the research for this paper. 1 See M. Friedman, Martin Buber’s Life and Thought: The Middle Years 1923–1945 (New York, 1983), pp. 258ff. 2 Although these lectures were delivered in Hebrew, they were published in German translation. See ibid., p. 266. Indeed, only those educated in the German philosophical tradition could appreciate the many subtleties in Buber’s words.

54

buber’s critique of heidegger

lectures consisted of penetrating critiques of Hegel and Marx, Feuerbach and Nietzsche, Heidegger and Scheler, one senses that they were meant to be more than intellectual exercises. Rather, they seem to be an existential Jewish response to German philosophers whose thought had not sufficiently penetrated was ist der Mensch and had, therefore, not constituted a humanism sufficient to answer, much less counter, the savagery which erupted in their homeland, which was so monstrously inhuman and which intended the Jews as its prime victims. One can imagine how evident this must have been to those who came to hear these lectures, lectures delivered by the most famous refugee from Germany in Palestine. One senses this intention in Buber’s remark about the aged Edmund Husserl (who died in 1938), who had been the most influential contemporary German philosopher and who had been stripped of his honored position in the German intellectual world. Husserl, a man totally estranged from Judaism and the Jewish people—who had actually converted to Christianity for what seem to be cultural and professional rather than directly religious reasons—was the prime example of a philosophical victim of the new Nazi regime, one who was too intertwined with European civilization to be able to respond as the alien Jew he was now branded in it.3 “Edmund Husserl . . . was a German Jew . . . and the pupil and adopted son, as he thought, of a people which experienced more greviously and fatally than any other . . . man’s lagging behind his works.”4 It seems as though Buber was convinced that, unlike Husserl, only a philosopher less enamored of European civilization and its philosophical exponents, only a philosopher intellectually their equal, and only a philosopher rooted in the historical outlook of his own people, only such a philosopher could answer the failure of European humanism at that hour. Indeed, it was Buber the Jewish philosopher who could best respond in a philosophically cogent way. Buber, Heidegger and Kant Of all the German philosophers discussed in these lectures, only one of them was still alive in 1938—Martin Heidegger. It is no accident that Buber presented a more detailed and penetrating critique of Heidegger 3 Re. Husserl’s conversion to Christianity on 8 April, 1866, see G. Granel, “Husserl, Edmund” (Fr.), Encyclopedia Universalis, Vol. 8, p. 614. 4 “What is Man?” in Between Man and Man (Boston, 1955), p. 159.



buber’s critique of heidegger

55

than of any of the other thinkers. For Heidegger was not only alive, he was also the leading philosopher in Germany and had enthusiastically endorsed the new regime. As late as 1935 he still spoke of “the inner truth and greatness” of National Socialism.5 Buber did not mention this in the lectures (only in 1951, after the Holocaust, does he mention Heidegger’s Nazism, as we shall see later), but his hearers no doubt knew who Heidegger was, even though it is likely that only a small number of them had actually penetrated Heidegger’s dense thought. Buber’s critique is ad rem rather than an ad hominem attack of the man Martin Heidegger. In the lectures Buber deals with the inadequacy of Heidegger’s philosophical anthropology, which had been worked out before the rise to power of the Nazis in Germany. Buber no doubt wanted to place what was happening in the perspective of the history of ideas so that his hearers could understand that what was happening was not a spontaneous outburst of barbarism, but rather a crisis of humanism. Only such understanding could lead to a new humanism capable of inspiring a new and truly different society. This was not historically possible without a direct confrontation with the thought of Heidegger. Buber begins his critique of all the German philosophers with whom he deals by adopting the problematic of Kant. Since the reconstructive neoKantian work of the earlier Jewish philosopher Hermann Cohen (d. 1918), German philosophy had been characterized by the slogan zurueck zu Kant (“back to Kant”).6 Even when Kant’s own conclusions were questioned and even rejected, his problematic was taken as the indispensable philosophical starting point. Buber begins his critique by citing Kant’s statement that the most fundamental philosophical question is “what is Man?” in that it is presupposed by the metaphysical question “what can I know?”; the ethical question “what ought I do?”; and the religious question “what

5 An Introduction to Metaphysics (Garden City [NY], 1961), p. 166. Although Heidegger made this statement in 1935, he did not publish it until after World War II—Einfuehrung in die Metaphysik (Tuebingen, 1953). The fact that such a statement is neither expunged nor apologized for says much about Heidegger’s so-called break with Nazism, a point to which I shall return. 6 This had begun with Cohen’s pioneering work, Kants Theorie der Erfahrung (Berlin, 1871). What Cohen showed was how well Kant’s philosophical concepts could be used to fully ground the new findings of the natural sciences and the advances in mathematics. He also showed how they could be used to give philosophical expression to the cultural advances of which the 19th century was so proud. Although Buber broke with such a reductio ad Kantium [see Franz Rosenzweig, Kleinere Schriften (Berlin, 1937), pp. 109–110], his references to Kant are still typically reverential in the spirit of German philosophy after Cohen.

56

buber’s critique of heidegger

may I hope?”. Buber concludes that for Kant “only philosophical anthropology . . . would be the fundamental philosophical science.”7 This does not mean that Buber has thereby simply accepted Kant’s philosophical anthropology.8 What Buber is attempting to do is to show that even Kant, whom one normally thinks of as the totally anthropocentric philosopher, acknowledges something beyond man with which he can relate. Concerning the third question, “what may I hope?” Buber writes, [B]ut it asserts, first, that there is something for me to hope (for obviously Kant does not mean that the answer to the third question is ‘Nothing’), secondly, that I am permitted to hope it, and thirdly, that precisely because I am permitted I can learn what it is that I may hope. That is what Kant says.9

Buber makes this point in contradistinction to Heidegger, who asserted that “finitude in man” is what Kant’s questions are in truth all about. Buber accuses Heidegger of misreading Kant and then states, “It is not my finitude that is under discussion here, but my real participation (Teilnahme) in knowing what there is to know.”10 Now if Heidegger sees finitude (Endlichkeit) in man as the essence of Kant’s questions, then it would seem that he has thereby constituted a more immediate phenomenology of human existence than Kant has, who, as Buber interprets him, saw human knowing, doing and hoping as participations in something transcendent. However, Heidegger does not identify finitude and human existence, but rather sees human existence (Dasein) as a manifestation of the finitude which essentially characterizes Being per se. Thus it is in man, but not reduced to man.11 As such, for Heidegger, in Buber’s correct description of his position, “anthropology is replaced by ‘fundamental ontology’.” This being the case, Buber will now analyze whether or not Heidegger’s fundamental ontology is phenomenologically adequate to ground our experience of human existence.

  7 Between Man and Man, p. 119.   8 Buber did express direct affinity with Kant’s notion of man as “an end in himself ”. See The Knowledge of Man (New York, 1965), p. 84. For the very different ontological basis for this in Kant, however, see D. Novak, Suicide and Morality (New York, 1975), pp. 95–97.   9 Between Man and Man, p. 121. 10 Ibid., 120 = “Das Problem des Menschen”, Werke (Munich and Heidelberg, 1962), Vol. 1, p. 312. 11  See Sein und Zeit (Tuebingen, 1979), pp. 14–15. As early as 1919–1921, in his reviews of Karl Jaspers’ Psychologie der Weltanschauungen, Heidegger criticized such an anthropocentric approach to philosophy. See D. F. Krell, intro., Martin Heidegger: Basic Writings (New York, 1977), 20–21.



buber’s critique of heidegger

57

What Heidegger asserted is that finitude in man (Dasein) intends the Finitude of Being (Sein).12 In characterizing Kant’s position, the position he accuses Heidegger of having distorted, Buber sees finitude in man as intending Infinity beyond him. The meaning is therefore that when we recognize man’s finitude we must at the same time recognize his participation in infinity, not as two juxtaposed qualities but as the twofold nature of processes in which man’s existence becomes recognizable . . . he shares in finitude and he shares in infinity.13

Buber himself does not identify with this position of Kant. For he seems to regard both Kant and Heidegger as being overly bound to an impersonal temporal frame of reference. In his own position eternity is the essence of Being “beyond the reach alike of the finitude and the infinity of space and time . . . the existence of eternity (das Ewige) as something quite different from the infinite, just as it is something quite different from the finite.”14 And, most important, he speaks of “the possibility of a connexion between me, a man, and the eternal.”15 What Buber has done, then, is to show in a remarkably pointed way that neither Kant nor Heidegger nor himself is an anthropocentric thinker in the sense, let us say, of Sartre’s pour-soi.16 Each of these philosophers has constituted a horizon against which human existence is seen. For Kant this horizon is “infinity”; for Heidegger it is “nothing” (specifically death); and for Buber it is “Eternity”, or better, the “Eternal Thou.”17 Since neither the position of Buber nor that of Heidegger is identical with Kant’s position, and since Kant’s anthropological question is the presentation of an unfinished agenda—an as yet unanswered problematic—what Buber has accomplished in separating Heidegger from Kant is two things. (1) He has shown that he rather than Heidegger is better equipped to answer the Kantian question “what is man?” in a sufficient way. (2) He has shown that Kant’s question introduces European man to the choice of 12 See his Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics (Bloomington, 1962), pp. 47, 223, 254. 13 Between Man and Man, p. 121. 14 Ibid., pp. 136–137 = “Das Problem des Menschen”, p. 329. 15 Ibid. 16 For Heidegger’s disassociation from Sartre’s anthropocentrism, see “Letter on Humanism” (1947), Basic Writings, esp. pp. 210ff.; W. Desan, The Tragic Finale: An Essay in the Philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre (New York, 1960), pp. 28ff. Buber himself referred to Sartre as “a remarkable psychological observer and highly gifted literary man”, as opposed to Heidegger, “who undoubtedly belongs to the historical rank of philosophers in the proper sense of the term.” Eclipse of God (New York, 1957), p. 70. 17 See I and Thou (New York, 1970), pp. 123ff.

58

buber’s critique of heidegger

either Heidegger’s answer or Buber’s answer to the question. In terms of the historical situation of 1938 one senses that Buber sees the humanist agenda (if not the actual philosophical content) of Kant as the starting point whence the new humanism he is proposing can once again commence. By going back to Kant Buber seems to be trying to show that he rather than Heidegger is more authentically rooted in the beginnings of modern European thought, specifically modern German philosophy. Buber’s critique of Heidegger becomes nothing less than an historically significant tour de force: the Jewish refugee claiming insight deeper than that of Germany’s leading philosopher on the basis of a greater affinity with Germany’s greatest philosopher! And this was not done on the basis of Kant’s “Germanness”, but rather on the basis of his universal philosophical greatness. Buber’s Critique of Heidegger’s sein und zeit In his direct critique of Heidegger, after moving beyond the Kantian starting point, Buber has basically two objectives. (1) He wants to show that when Heidegger does deal with anthropological questions, especially regarding interpersonal relationships, his phenomenology is inadequate to the actual human experience. (2) He wants to show that this phenomenological inadequacy is the result of the inadequacy of his fundamental ontology in which his anthropology is grounded. For Heidegger Mitsein, that is “being-with-others,” is a function of Dasein, that is the human experience of its project (ek-sistenz) as essentially finite.18 Since man qua Dasein is “thrown” (Geworfenheit) into a world already “there” (da), he is necessarily involved (Sorge) with artifacts (Zuhanden) and objects (Vorhanden), but also with other persons with whom he is not only involved but concerned (Fuersorge).19 Heidegger acknowledges and constitutes a realm of the interpersonal. Buber recognizes this, but nevertheless finds Heidegger’s Mitsein to be lacking in the true mutuality of the I-Thou relationship.20 It still presents itself as the

18  See Sein und Zeit, pp. 118ff. 19  See ibid., pp. 121ff. 20 In The Philosophy of Martin Buber, ed. P. A. Schilpp and M. Friedman (LaSalle [IL], 1967) Nathan Rotenstreich (pp. 126–127), Emmanuel Levinas (p. 148) and Jean Wahl (pp. 495–496) contend that Buber has underestimated Heidegger’s Mitsein as adequate to the phenomenon of the interpersonal. However, considering Buber’s aversion to pre-conditions



buber’s critique of heidegger

59

very type of individualism that Heidegger himself so vigorously attempted to overcome.21 In its essence solicitude (Fuersorge) does not come from mere co-existence (Mitsein) with others, as Heidegger thinks, but from essential (wesentlichen), direct, whole relations (Beziehungen) between man and man (Mensch zu Mensch) . . . In mere solicitude man remains essentially with himself, even if he is moved with extreme pity . . . he makes his assistance (Beistand), not himself, accessible to the other . . . he ‘is concerned with the other,’ but he is not anxious for the other to be concerned with him.22

The force of Buber’s critique can be seen by looking at the German terms he uses and the contrasts he makes based on them. Heidegger’s Mitsein is characterized as a Beistand, literally “standing next to one”, that is, each individual is on a finite journey culminating in the non-relational event, death. The journey is conducted alongside other Daseins, but their horizontal presence is secondary to the vertical end/terminus which each one faces alone. Interpersonal relationships, the prime concern of philosophical anthropology, are Beziehungen, that is those ties from person to person, where in facing each other wholly and immediately (unmittelbaren) these persons transcend the limits of their finite, temporal, life journey. Only Mensch zu Mensch is the full meaning of both love and friendship experienced. Without the acknowledgment of this as the Urphaenomenon of all personal experience, any constitution of the realm of Mitsein misses its own unique object. It would seem that Buber regards Heidegger’s Dasein as being similar to Leibniz’s monads, that is independent entities which happen to coincide at various points, but essentially having no common ground, no mutual presence.23 Heidegger’s Mitsein is, in the last analysis, superficial precisely because it is epiphenomenal. The Urphaenomenon is Finitude which man experiences as his inevitable and imminent journey to his own death. Thus he writes in Sein und Zeit,

(Bedingungen), as we shall see later, it would seem that he rejects Fuersorge precisely because it is too preparatory of the I for its unknown Thou and thus precludes spontaneous mutuality. See Ich und Du (Heidelberg, 1962), p. 15 and p. 31. 21 See Sein und Zeit, pp. 114ff. 22 Between Man and Man, pp. 169–170 = “Das Problem des Menschen”, p. 367. See I and thou, p. 80. 23 For Heidegger’s use of Leibnizian monadology contra I-Thou mutuality, see his Basic Problems of Phenomenology (Bloomington, 1982), pp. 300–301.

60

buber’s critique of heidegger With death Dasein stands before itself (steht sich .. . selbst . . . bevor) in its ownmost potentiality-for-Being (Seinkoennen) . . . Its death is the possibility of no-longer-being-able-to-be-there. If Dasein stands before itself as this possibility, it has been fully assigned to its ownmost potentiality-for-Being. When it stands before itself in this way, all its relations (Bezuege) to any other Dasein have been undone. This ownmost non-relational (unbezuegliche) possibility is at the same time the uttermost one.24

For Buber this is nothing less than solipsism. Apparently nothing more remains now for the solitary man but to seek an intimate communication with himself. This is the basic situation from which Heidegger’s philosophy arises.25

Buber, moreover, indicates that Heidegger’s acceptance of the truth of Nietzsche’s motto “God is dead” is directly related to his inability to properly constitute Mitsein. Here he shows how Heidegger’s fundamental ontology lies at the root of the problem. Heidegger turns away not merely from a relation to a divine unconditioned (Unbedingten) being, but also from a relation in which man experiences another than himself in the unconditioned, and so experiences the unconditioned. Heidegger’s ‘existence’ (Dasein) is monological.26

At this point, in his very choice of German terms again, Buber counters Heidegger’s ontology with his own. And, for Buber, his own theological ontology is a more adequate grounding for authentic philosophical anthropology. The key phrase, appearing in this brief passage three times, is unbedingt, usually translated “unconditioned”, but literally meaning something which has not become a “thing” (Ding). Something which is capable of being bedingt is something capable of losing its directness as a “thou”, something capable of becoming an “it.” For Buber only God is unbedingt in that only God is always Thou and never it. As Buber wrote in Ich und Du, The You-sense of the man who in his relationships to all individual yous experiences the disappointment (Enttaeuschung) of the change into It (Eswerdens), aspires beyond all of them and yet not all the way toward his eternal You . . . a discovery of what is most original and the origin.

24 Being and Time (New York, 1962), p. 294 = Sein und Zeit, p. 250. 25 Between Man and Man, p. 167. Buber refers to Heidegger’s self as “a closed system” (ibid., p. 172). 26 Ibid., p. 168.



buber’s critique of heidegger

61

The You-sense that cannot be satiated until it finds the infinite you (das unendliche Du) . . . This is what confronts us immediately (unmittelbar) and first and always, and legitimately it can only be addressed (nur angesprochen), not asserted (nicht ausgesagt).27

Buber counters Heidegger by reasserting the necessary theological grounding of true human being-together—understanding “theological” as describing the experience of speaking to God (ansprechen) rather than propositions about God (aussprechen).28 For Buber, everything non-divine is basically ephemeral: it emerges from being an it, is briefly a thou, and then returns to being an it, to its thingness, again.29 Without being grounded in the Eternal Thou/God, non-divine I-thou relationships are not themselves sufficient for the full intentionality of human existence.30 Man cannot separate himself from other persons for the sake of becoming a “Single One” alone before God. For Buber, this is the error of Kierkegaard.31 The I-Thou relationship is not an exclusive symbiosis. Indeed such a symbiosis could turn God into an individual human projection. Nevertheless, to concentrate on human relationships alone, without the connection with God as their ultimate telos, is to be left more and more as an I without an all-present Thou. It is only when each finite thou is seen as a participation in the Eternal Thou that the I cannot turn unto itself in ultimate concern. Without the Eternal Thou all finite thous become so many episodes by which man passes until his final rendezvous with death, his own unique end. For Buber, the I-thou relationship without the Eternal Thou is nothing more than Heidegger’s Mitsein. Without the Eternal Thou death becomes ultimate and all prior relationships become so many semiparallel monads. As Heidegger himself writes, 27 I and Thou, pp. 128–129 = Ich und Du, pp. 81–82. 28 For this reason, undoubtedly, Buber and Franz Rosenzweig translated Exodus 3:13 as “Ich werde dasein, als der ich dasein werde”, viz., God as Presence (3:14—ICH BIN DA) rather than as a describable and categorizable entity [Der Fuenf Buecher der Weisung (Cologne, 1954), p. 158]. See Buber’s Zur einer neuen Verdeutschung der Schrift (Olten, 1954), pp. 28–29 and Rosenzweig, Kleinere Schriften, pp. 185ff. The fact that this use of Dasein was made after the publication of Sein und Zeit is not to be overlooked. However, Buber’s and Rosenzweig’s use of Dasein is significantly different. Whereas for Heidegger Dasein is the being whose essence is to be “there” (da), i.e., finite, for Buber and Rosenzweig God chooses “to be there”, but can just as well choose “not to be there”, viz., His presence is by no means necessary. For the Judaic background of this view, see D. Novak, Law and Theology in Judaism (New York, 1974), Vol. 1, p. 148. 29 See I and Thou, p. 147. 30 See Novak, Law and Theology in Judaism (New York, 1976), Vol. 2, pp. 11ff. 31 See “The Question of the Single One”, Between Man and Man, pp. 40ff.

62

buber’s critique of heidegger In suffering loss, however, we have no way of access (zugaenglich) to the loss-of-Being as such which the dying man ‘suffers.’ The dying of Others is not something which we experience in a genuine sense; at most we are always just ‘there alongside’ (dabei) . . . By its very essence, death is in every case mine . . . In dying it is shown that mineness (Jemeinigkeit) and existence are ontologically constitutive for death.32

Buber not only shows how the relationship with God intends an Eternal who transcends death, but he also shows how such a transcendence alone is capable of explaining the truth manifest in human love and friendship. In the dark year of 1938 Buber holds out this faith as alone being capable of sustaining any humanism at all. Buber’s Subsequent Critique of Heidegger Heidegger, following the lead of his teacher, Edmund Husserl, emphasized the priority of Dasein over Mitsein, that is, the priority of man’s relation to the world (Verhaeltnis) over his relationship with other persons (Beziehung).33 Even as late as 1943, when the break with phenomenology is supposed to have been long completed, Heidegger nevertheless still spoke of truth as the uncovering of things.34 The essence of the correspondence is determined rather by the kind of relation (Beziehung) that obtains between the statement and the thing . . . the statement regarding the coin relates ‘itself’ (bezieht sich) to this thing in that it presents (vor-stellt) it . . . The relation of the presentative statement is the accomplishment of that bearing (Verhaeltnis) which originally and always comes to prevail as a comportment (Verhalten).35

This priority of thing-relations over person-relationships can be seen in Heidegger’s use above of the key terms, Verhaeltnis and Beziehung. Beziehung, what I term “relationship”, is the connection immediately involving

32 Being and Time. p. 284 = Sein und Zeit, p. 240. 33 See E. Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, 5.55 (the Hague, 1960), pp. 124–125; idem., The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology (Evanston, 1970), pp. 168ff., 184–186, 256–258, 328–329; E. Levinas, Existence and Existents (the Hague, 1978), pp. 85, 94–96. See Heidegger, The Basic Problems of Phenomenology, pp. 297–298; Vom Wesen des Grundes (Evanston, 1969), p. 86; H.-G. Gadamer, Philosophical Hermeneutics (Evanston, 1976), pp. 7–8. 34 Re the so-called redirection (Kehre) in Heidegger’s thought, see W.J. Richardson, Heidegger: Through Phenomenology to Thought (the Hague, 1963), pp. 210ff. 35 “On the Essence of Truth”, Basic Writings, p. 123 = “Vom Wesen der Wahrheit”, Wegmarken (Frankfurt am-Main, 1967), pp. 79–80.



buber’s critique of heidegger

63

persons, namely, those who make “statements” (Aussage) regarding things. Verhaeltnis, on the other hand, what I term “relation”, is the way the thing is a thing unto itself (Ding an sich) and is thus “uncovered” as a present phenomenon.36 This “uncovering” (das Unverborgene/aletheia) is the essence of truth.37 Relations to things and then relationships with persons determine the world into which persons are thrown.38 Although this statement of Heidegger was written twenty years after Buber’s Ich und Du was published in 1923, it represents a whole philosophical Tendenz, a Tendenz which Buber already anticipated in Ich und Du and which he argued against. Thus the lectures of 1938 simply elaborate the argument of 1923 (indeed, one could say this about everything Buber wrote after 1923). For Buber, the person’s relationship with the other person is categorically different from his relations with artifacts and objects in the world and ontologically prior to them. One cannot speak of one Dasein in the world but of two essentially different manifestations of human personhood. The basic I-You word can only be spoken with one’s whole being. The basic I-It word can never be spoken with one’s whole being. There is no I as such (an sich) but only the I of the basic word I-You and the I of the basic word I-It.39

As such there is an ontological difference between relationships (Beziehungen) and relations (Verhaeltnisse). “The world as experience (Erfahrung) belongs to the basic word I-It. The basic word I-You establishes the world of relation (Beziehung).”40 The difference cannot be bridged by some prior reality containing both poles, as is the case with Heidegger’s In-der-WeltSein. This essential twofoldness cannot be overcome by invoking a ‘world of ideas’ as a third element that might transcend (ueberwunden) this opposition. For I speak . . . not of any I-in-itself and not of any Being-in-itself (Sein an sich).41

36 Phenomena are not, however, “appearances” of something in itself permanently hidden as in Kant’s Ding an sich. Thus Heidegger speaks of “phenomenon” as “a distinctive way in which something can be encountered (Begegnisart).” Being and Time, p. 54 = Sein und Zeit, p. 31. Cf. Kant, Kritik der reinen Vernunft, B67. Here one should note the influence of Hegel on Heidegger. See R. Plant, Hegel (Bloomington, 1973), pp. 81–82. 37 “On the Essence of Truth”, pp. 127–128. See Sein und Zeit, p. 33. 38 This is true of the schematic sequence in Cartesian Meditations and Sein und Zeit respectively. 39 I and Thou, p. 54 = Ich und Du, pp. 7–8. 40 Ibid., p. 56 = ibid., p. 10. 41  Ibid., pp. 64–65 = ibid., p. 17.

64

buber’s critique of heidegger

Buber not only anticipated the confusion between thing-relations and person-relationships in Heidegger, he also directly criticized Heidegger’s notion of truth explicated in his important 1943 essay, “Vom Wesen der Wahrheit.” The truth that is concerned in this fashion is not the sublime ‘Unconcealment’ suitable to Being itself, the aletheia of the Greeks; it is the simple conception of truth of the Hebrew Bible, whose etymon means ‘faithfulness’, the faithfulness of man or the faithfulness of God . . . The human truth of which I speak—the truth vouchsafed men . . . opens itself to one just in one’s existence as a person. This concrete person, in the life-space allotted to him, answers with his faithfulness for the word that is spoken by him.42

For Heidegger, as we have seen, thing-relations are prior to personrelationships and actually determine them. For Buber person-relationships are prior to thing-relations. Buber shows this by contrasting the Hebrew emet with the Greek aletheia, placing as much emphasis on the etymology of the former as denoting a person-relationship as Heidegger placed on the etymology of the latter as denoting a thing-relation. In making this contrast Buber has quite literally contrasted the vision of Jerusalem with the vision of Athens,43 seeing Heidegger, at least philosophically, as being an authentic spokesman of the latter. In dealing with Heidegger in this way, Buber has paid him the high compliment of being taken as the rightful heir of the legacy of western thought going back to the Greek language as used even before the emergence of philosophy. In this sense Buber attempts a task even more radical than Heidegger’s attempt to build his philosophy on pre-philosophical Greek. Buber attempts nothing less than eliminating the Greek cultural matrix altogether for the building of his philosophy. Buber simply refuses to allow the primacy of the I-Thou relationship to be either reduced to something else or included in some greater whole, even for the sake of systematic comprehensiveness. I-Thou and I-Thou alone must be the absolute starting point for any thought about

42 The Knowledge of Man, p. 120. See, also, E. Berkovits, Man and God: Studies in Biblical Theology (Detroit, 1969), pp. 253ff. 43 The antithesis between Greek thought and Hebraic thought (as opposed to the Philonic synthesis) goes back to Tertullian’s famous remark quid ergo Athenis et Hierosolymis? (De Praescriptione Haereticorum, 7). It became a leitmotif for such Jewish thinkers as R. Judah Ha-Levi (Kuzari, 1.63), R. Samuel David Luzzatto (Pentateuch Commentary: Deut. 6:5) and Lev Shestov (Athens and Jerusalem).



buber’s critique of heidegger

65

the human person.44 What Buber’s philosophical anthropology lacks in comprehensiveness—as compared with Heidegger’s ontology—it gains in intensity. He readily admits in What is Man that it cannot “set itself the task of establishing a foundation either for metaphysics or for the individual philosophical sciences,” because if it did this “it would miss the very reality of its own subject . . . it would reach . . . a false unity which has no reality.”45 Therefore, philosophical anthropology can only perform a comparative rather than a constitutive function outside of the I-Thou relationship itself. Buber readily admits this limitation. Even as it must again and again distinguish within the human race in order to arrive at a solid comprehension, so it must compare him with other things, other living creatures, other bearers of consciousness, in order to define his special place reliably for him.46

In 1938 a Jewish thinker could only attempt to reestablish the irreducibility of the human person, an irreducibility becoming so radically threatened in the life of his own people. In 1938 a Jewish thinker could not speak of man “in der Welt” inasmuch as the long familiar world had been radically violated and one could hardly predict what world if any a Jew—or for that matter European man—would find himself in. The argument of 1923, which was philosophically required then in the aftermath of the death of idealism after the First World War, became an existential requirement in 1938, the year characterized by Kristallnacht and the impotence of the European democracies before Hitler in Munich. Buber’s voice was ­literally “a voice calling in the wilderness”, a voice attempting to simply clear a way.47 The hour required nothing less and the hour allowed nothing more. Buber’s Critique of Heidegger’s Nazism In Buber’s critiques of Heidegger which we have heretofore examined, we have seen Buber expressing himself as a philosopher setting up arguments ad rem rather than ad hominem. However, in an essay which was originally a lecture delivered on his first American speaking tour in 1951,

44 Re the subsequent influence of this fundamental Buberian insight on other thinkers, see M. Friedman, Martin Buber: The Life of Dialogue, pp. 165–166, 187. 45 Between Man and Man, pp. 122–123. 46 Ibid. 47 See Isaiah 40:3ff.

66

buber’s critique of heidegger

Buber spoke of Heidegger and specifically refered to Heidegger’s enthusiastic endorsement of the Nazi regime and its “philosophy” in the early 1930’s. This statement could have only been made after the Holocaust when Nazism had already fulfilled its ghastly potential. To one who observes the way in which Heidegger now speaks of the historical, there can be no doubt that it is current history . . . The sinister leading personality of the then current history is proclaimed as ‘the present and future German reality and its law.’ Here history no longer stands, as in all believing times, under divine judgment, but it itself, the unappealable, assigns to the Coming One his way.48

The fact of Heidegger’s Nazism has been a topic of debate between his detractors and his admirers. The latter have regarded it as an unfortunate misjudgment on the part of an otherwise great philosopher. They are quick to point out that Heidegger became disillusioned with Nazism in the middle 1930’s and ceased making any statements in its favor.49 Other admirers have admitted that “whereas the thought of Being and Time and of the years immediately following did not ‘compel’ surrender to Nazism, it was ‘unable to prevent it’.”50 Buber, however, goes much further than that and shows that his argumentum ad hominem regarding Heidegger is in truth an argumentum ad rem, namely, Heidegger’s endorsement of Nazism was made on his own philosophical terms. Thus Buber continues, Heidegger . . . explained: ‘History exists only when the essence of truth is originally decided.’ But it is just his hour which he believes to be history, the very same hour whose problematics in its most inhuman manifestation led him astray . . . He has bound his thought to his hour as no other philosopher has done. Can he, the existential thinker, despite all this, existentially wrestle, in opposition to the hour, for a freedom devoted to the eternal and gain it? Or must he succumb to the fate of the hour . . . ?51

If one examines the very choice of German terms Heidegger used in his political pronouncements, one can see how accurate Buber’s critique really is. In 1933 Heidegger’s infamous statement to the students of Freiburg University, whose rector he was, is in full as follows,

48 M. Buber, Eclipse of God, pp. 76–77. See M. Buber, Pointing the Way: Collected Essays (New York, 1957), p. 25. 49 See Hannah Arendt, “Heidegger at Eighty” in Heidegger and Modern Philosophy (New Haven, 1978), p. 302. 50 W. J. Richardson, “Heidegger and God—and Professor Jonas”, Thought, Vol. 40, no. 156 (Spring, 1965), p. 39. 51 Eclipse of God, p. 77.



buber’s critique of heidegger

67

The rules (Regeln) of your Being are not theses and ‘ideas.’ The Fuehrer himself and alone is the present (heutige) and future (kuenftige) German reality (Wirklichkeit) and its law. Learn more profoundly to know: From now on demand of everything a decision (Entscheidung) and of every act answerability (Verantwortung). Heil Hitler! Martin Heidegger, Rector52

Every term he chose for this statement would have been familiar to anyone who had carefully read Sein und Zeit, which had been published only six years before. Concerning “reality/actuality” Heidegger wrote that “only the Experience (Erlebnis) one is having ‘right now’ (wirklich) is ‘actual’ . . . The birth which is past and the death which is only coming lack actuality (Wirklichkeit) . . .”53 And concerning the present and future he wrote, Coming back to itself futurally (zukuenftig), resoluteness brings itself into the Situation by making present ( gegenwaertigend) . . . releases from itself the Present . . .54 . . . Self-projection upon the ‘for-the-sake-of-oneself’ is grounded in the future and is an essential characteristic of existentiality. The primary meaning of existentiality is the future.55

Finally, concerning “answerability” (Verantwortung) Heidegger wrote, The common sense of the ‘they’ (das Man) knows only the satisfying of manipulable rules (Regel) and public norms and the failure to satisfy them. It reckons up infractions of them and tries to balance them off. . . . In understanding the call (Rufverstehend) Dasein lets its ownmost self (das eigenste Selbst) take action in itself (in sich handeln) in terms of that potentialityfor-Being (Seinkoennen) which it has chosen. Only so can it be answerable (verantwortlich).56

One can thus see Heidegger’s brief message to his Freiburg students in 1933 as the practical application of his philosophy of 1926. Presence towards the future rather than rules calls the authentic person, as opposed to the faceless “individual” (das Man) of modern industrialized society, to action. Authenticity, as opposed to thoughtless conformity, required total

52 Quoted in G. Schnceberger, Nachlese zu Heidegger (Bern, 1962), pp. 135–136 (my translation). 53 Being and Time, p. 426 = Sein und Zeit, p. 374. 54 Ibid., p. 374 = ibid., pp. 326–327. 55 Ibid., pp. 375–376 = ibid., p. 327. 56 Ibid., p. 334 = ibid., p. 288.

68

buber’s critique of heidegger

response (Verantwortung) to the call of the future enunciated in the present. This was precisely how Hitler presented himself and captured the imagination of the German people.57 Considering that such a call was for Heidegger “history”, and that history is where the essence of truth is to be found, then it seems as though his philosophy was in truth an anticipation of Hitler. Heidegger’s enthusiasm for Hitler and the Nazis was precisely because it gave ontic validity to his ontological speculation.58 For Buber, to whom the life of the thinker and his thought are inextricably bound, the later critique of Heidegger is a demonstration of the truth of this assumption.59 It seems to be a warning to those contemporary thinkers, especially Christians, who are tempted to use Heidegger’s ontology in order to construct a new existential humanism. It warns them that an ontology which lent itself to Nazism so readily and so easily, and whose originator embraced Nazism so enthusiastically, must be seen as the very antithesis of the attempt to construct a humanism worthy of the true character of human existence.60 It would seem that Buber was attempting to show that the Holocaust and everything that contributed to it had horribly confirmed after 1945 what Buber saw as the inauthentic humanism of Heidegger back in 1938. Buber spoke to the post-Holocaust world to warn against the colossal naiveté which could allow thinkers to regrasp an ontology without considering its ontic consequences. Buber, by the mere fact of his being a survivor and a refugee, made this warning especially poignant existentially. 57 See, e.g., A. Hitler, Mein Kampf (Munich, 1934), pp. 417–418; also G. L. Mosse, Germans and Jews (New York, 1970), pp. 148ff. 58 See Emil Fackenheim, To Mend the World (New York, 1982), pp. 166ff.; and idem., Encounters Between Judaism and Modern Philosophy (New York, 1973), pp. 216–217. 59 Along these lines emphasized by Buber I strongly disagree with my friend, Prof. Michael Wyschogrod, who in his article, “Heidegger: The Limits of Philosophy”, SH’MA, Vol. 12, no. 231, argued that one must totally separate Heidegger the philosopher from Heidegger the man, because “Philosophy is exclusively an intellectual discipline. In philosophy, all that matters is whether what you say is true and profound . . . No matter what you do” (p. 84). However, Heidegger not only acted as a Nazi, he also spoke and wrote as a Nazi, using his own philosophical nomenclature. Therefore, even though Prof. Wyschogrod argues that Heidegger’s words could have been used by anti-Nazis as well, the fact is they were not. And surely Heidegger himself was the best judge later of what he meant earlier. Hence, can one not apply ethical criteria and say that if Heidegger’s words themselves are used by their own speaker and writer to justify something as blatantly evil as Nazism (even in its earlier manifestations), then how true can they be about the human condition? The assumption here is that what is good for man is also true about man. See Thomas Acquinas, Summa Theologiae, I–II, q. 58, a. 4. 60 See Hans Jonas, “Heidegger and Theology”, The Phenomenon of Life (New York, 1966), pp. 235–261.



buber’s critique of heidegger

69

Conclusion Buber’s critique of Heidegger in its various manifestations indicates how deeply he had penetrated to the core of Heidegger’s thought and how astutely he understood its historical significance both before and after the Holocaust. It was a true confrontation between a Jewish thinker and a German thinker, each representing and incorporating respectively different world views.61 It is to Buber’s credit as a philosopher concerned with truth that he took Heidegger so seriously and did not dogmatically dismiss him simply because of his deplorable and unrepentent Nazism. In so doing he enriched philosophy and showed the strength of Jewish thought to meet philosophical and historical challenges. In this sense contemporary Jewish thinkers can learn as much from Buber’s example as they can learn from the content of his incisive critique of Heidegger itself.

61 How different this is from Hermann Cohen, who saw the perfect harmonization between Germanness and Judaism. See “Deutschtum und Judenthum” I and II, Juedische Schriften (Berlin, 1924), Vol. 2, pp. 237–301. In all fairness to Cohen, however, his “Deutschtum” was a highly idealized construct. See D. Novak, “Universal Law in the Theology of Hermann Cohen”, Modern Judaism, Vol. 1, no. 1 (May, 1981), pp. 111–113—now in The Image of the Non-Jew in Judaism (New York and Toronto, 1983), chap. 14.

ON HUMAN DIGNITY* 1. Human Dignity and Human Rights The idea of human dignity has been of essential interest in all discussions of human rights during the past sixty years. The central document in all these discussions, the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, in its preamble speaks of “fundamental human rights and the dignity and worth of the human person,” and “of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family.”1 And the first article of that historic declaration states: “All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights.”2 This statement, coining as it did just three years after the enormous assaults on the rights and dignity of millions of human beings committed by the Nazi regime ended, was very much occasioned by the universal reaction to these unprecedented violations of humanity itself.3 It has been suggested that those who committed these assaults were to be judged under the old category of hostis generis humani (“an enemy of humankind”).4 The first major reaction to these assaults on humanity was negative, namely, the outrage expressed in the verdicts rendered in the Nuremberg Trials of 1946–1947 against leading Nazi officials, who were convicted of the war crimes they committed against the rights and dignity of the millions of human beings who were their victims. The second major reaction, though, coming on the heels of the Nuremberg Trials, was the very positive Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Even though these two statements reflect principles not invented by history but only occasioned by certain historical events, nevertheless, both of these statements have much more moral weight than would have been the case had they merely * Originally published in The Quest for a Common Humanity: Human Dignity and Otherness in the Religious Traditions of the Mediterranean, ed. Katell Berthelot and Matthias Morgenstern (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 2011), 271–88. 1 See J. Morsink, The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999), 329. 2 Ibid., 330. 3 For the historical context and the story of the writing of this great document, see M. A. Glendon, A World Made New (New York: Random House, 2001). 4 For a critique of this application of a category that has been traditionally applied to pirates as stateless individual criminals to a criminal state and its officials, see H. Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem (rev. ed.; New York: Penguin Books, 1965), 261.

72

on human dignity

been the result of historically detached, abstract, academic theorizing. Furthermore, I think the positive response would not have had its urgency had it not been for the negative response coming first. In talmudic logic, the positive is to be inferred from the negative.5 We are often only able to formulate our more abstract sense of justice when stimulated to do so by our more concrete experience of injustice. Just as the reasoned verdicts of the Nuremberg Trails have become the negative template, according to which the judgment of later war crimes has been formulated, so has the Universal Declaration of Human Rights become the positive template, according to which later enactments of human rights and human dignity have been formulated. So, I would now like to propose a view of human dignity that might clarify some of the philosophical issues permeating the Universal Declaration. This view of human dignity will be drawn from the three main sources of law and ethics in the West: the Greek philosophical tradition, the Jewish theological tradition, and the Roman legal tradition. Surely, these three great traditions have made contributions to various systems of law and ethics in the West. Since human rights and human dignity have been juxtaposed in the Universal Declaration, we need to ask how they are related one to the other. Clearly, their juxtaposition is not a random listing. Instead, it suggests a human right to dignity. That is, human beings have a claim on other human beings to recognize their human dignity in word and in deed. 2. What is Dignity? Wherefrom Dignity? But what is “dignity”? Here I think there is a remarkable congruence regarding the idea of dignity in the three basic languages and traditions that have been at the heart of western civilization since earliest times: Latin, Greek, and Hebrew. The word “dignity” itself comes from the Latin dignus, meaning “worthy” or “deserving.” But worthy and deserving of what? The Greek equivalent of dignitas, which is timē, means “honor.” So, up to this point, we can interpret “dignity” as being the honor that is owed to a human being by other human beings. But, what do we mean by “honor”? Here the Hebrew equivalent of dignus and timē, which is kavod, helps us better determine the dignity or honor some human beings owe other human beings. The noun kavod, like most nouns in Hebrew, has a 5 See b. Nedarim [Ned.] 11a and parallels.



on human dignity

73

verbal root. The verbal root of kavod is kaved, which literally means to “make weighty.” In an interpersonal context, kaved means to recognize someone else’s “weight” or importance or worth by respecting him or her for it. Pulling these three terms, from Latin, Greek, and Hebrew together, we arrive at the following formula: Human dignity is the respect some humans as humans claim from other humans. When that claim is justified, those other humans being so claimed owe such respect to the one claiming it, that is, they have a duty to respect the human dignity of those by whom or for whom it has been claimed. To those who would regard the human right to dignity to be almost trivial compared to the human right to life and liberty, surely the historical events that occasioned both the Nuremberg Verdicts and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights have demonstrated quite clearly that gross violations of the human rights to life and liberty were the final results of a process that began with the violation of the dignity of those human persons and peoples by the very same persons and peoples who finally killed them. That whole process began with such egregious degradations of humanity as arbitrarily designating some others as Untermenschen or “subhuman.” When speaking of human dignity, the most basic question concerns the reason for anyone making such a claim on anyone else. Who entitles one to make such a claim? Where do such claims come from? When does one begin to consciously exercise this right? Here there seem to be three possibilities for understanding who makes a claim to dignity: the individual person him- or herself, or a person’s particular society, or God. Does a person entitle him- or herself to make such a claim on others? But, if so, when does a person begin to engage in such self-entitlement? And, if so, how do we determine which claims are valid and which claims are invalid? No doubt, we all know people who make outrageous claims for respectful recognition. Moreover, what about those who do not or cannot claim respect for themselves? Are they not deserving of respect? If one is the source of his or her own claim for dignity, then it would seem only that individual could make such a claim for him- or herself. Here one’s advocate for human dignity can only be oneself or someone that has been explicitly delegated to do so on one’s behalf. Furthermore, does one who has not respected or cannot respect the dignity of others have a right to claim it for him- or herself, or have it claimed for him or her by somebody else? Because of the problems raised by the extreme individualism that assumes a human being creates him- or herself in the social world, many

74

on human dignity

would say that human rights are social entitlements. As such, individuals receive them from their respective societies. In this view, human rights are like citizenship, which is bestowed upon one either at birth or by a process of naturalization in a society to which a person has relocated or been relocated from the place of one’s birth. But, by what standard is such social entitlement not arbitrary? If one’s particular society is the source of one’s right to dignity, what prevents one’s society from removing that right from one for any or no reason, or not granting that right in the first place despite the fact that one is still very much a resident in that society and subject to its laws and regulations? Indeed, because of political facts in the past century, tyrannical facts that very much occasioned the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948, and facts that are still very much with us in this new century, because of all that history, fewer and fewer people in the West are willing to look to the state, which is the institution of society, to be the true source of their human rights. Instead, the state is supposed to be for most of us the enforcer and protector of human rights, rights it neither initiated nor can it take away with impunity. Most often in past discussions of human rights, of which the right to dignity might very well be first and foremost, human rights have been taken to be divine entitlements. Thus the United States Declaration of Independence of 1776 speaks of humans being “endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights.” This clearly implies that humans are not the source of their own rights. As such, they cannot very well invent rights for themselves that contradict or distort the rights they have been given by God. They cannot waive the rights they themselves do not own. Others cannot take away these rights once they have been given. And someone else, human or even divine, can be a person’s rights-advocate even when that person does not or cannot claim respect or dignity for him- or herself, let alone delegate someone else to do that for him or her. Nevertheless, just how that divine entitlement of human rights actually works is a question that religiously oriented philosophers, and certainly theologians who can affirm democratic government in good faith, need to consider more precisely and propose more plausible answers to. Notwithstanding the very good reasons—theological, philosophical, and historical—for holding this view of human rights entitlement, I shall not engage this issue here and now since it is an issue of great controversy in the West at present as seen in debates about whether the proposed constitution of the European Union can or should mention the name of God, or whether the mention of the “supremacy of God” in the preamble of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Responsibilities is meant to be



on human dignity

75

taken literally, or whether the motto of the United States, “In God we trust,” has any practical meaning whatsoever. Besides, I do not think that moral propositions can be deduced from theological propositions (which doesn’t mean these two kinds of propositions have no logical relation, only that the logical relation they do have is not one of deduction or even one of application or schematization).6 Therefore, let it just be assumed hereafter that we all posit the inalienable or permanent character of the human right to dignity. The question of the ultimate entitlement of rights, which is surely a metaphysical question, will be bracketed here, even though that question cannot be permanently suppressed no matter how much philosophical positivists do try to suppress the why question about human rights. Accordingly, we need to look at what this right means, and how rather than why this right can be coherently invoked in cases where it seems to be challenged. (Yet, even at this practical level, the God question comes in when humans claim respect for their religious faith and practices, and when they protest that their faith and practice have been subjected to the indignity of ridicule or suspicion.) 3. Human Dignity and Human Desert Human dignity seems to be something all humans deserve equally. In fact, there is a whole way of thinking today called “egalitarianism,” which stresses that the right to equal respect ought to be the norm in all human interactions. To treat some persons with more dignity than others seems to be unjust to all persons, that is, some persons getting too much respect at the expense of other persons getting too little respect thereby. So let us now ask: Do all human beings deserve this equal recognition from all others because of what they do or because of who they are? Now, if human dignity is something we owe other humans because of what they do, then how can all persons deserve the same respectful recognition when we see such great variety among human deeds: some doing much more and much

6 The Universal Declaration of Human Rights does not mention God, an omission that was no accident. See Morsink, The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, 284–90. In fact, René Cassin, one of the main architects of the declaration, thought that the strictly secular character of the declaration was essential. See his La pensée et l’action (Boulogne-surSeine: F. Lalou, 1972), 116. For an argument that the U.S. Declaration of Independence and the Canadian Charter of Rights and Responsibilities are both stronger philosophically because of their mention of God, see D. Novak, In Defense of Religious Liberty (Wilmington: ISI, 2009), chap. 3.

76

on human dignity

better than others; some doing much less and much worse than others? In other words, is there enough human dignity to be distributed equally to all humans? On the other hand, if human dignity is something we owe all other humans simply because they are human (which is now an easy biological determination on the basis of their uniquely human DNA), what is it about the fact of human being that makes it worthy of respect? What is it about human being per se that is dignified? Indeed, couldn’t it be said that the very idea of dignity involves a distinction: some are dignified because some others are not, or some are lacking dignity because some others have it? In other words, if human dignity is ubiquitous among all human beings, doesn’t that assertion suffer from what logicians call the “fallacy of generalization,” namely, doesn’t this designation make human dignity too general to have the special significance that the term (and its various cognates) has in its usual denotation? Doesn’t extending human dignity to every human being thereby trivialize that same dignity? Isn’t this like the old television program for children, where the host told all the children listening to him that “each one of you is special”? Surely, the more perceptive children listening to this could see the logical fallacy being told them by this well-meaning, but perhaps less-perceptive, adult. Based on the considerations above, it might be well for us to formulate the idea of human dignity in such a way that in one sense we recognize that dignity is owed every human being, to “all members of the human family” in the words of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, but in another sense we recognize that there are dignities that are owed some persons but not to others. It seems, moreover, that each sense of human dignity is humanly incomplete without the other. The equal dignity owed all human beings cannot be the reason for the recognition that the specific achievements of some persons deserve from all others, that is, when these special achievements especially benefit the common good (bonum commune) of all others. And the special dignity of some human beings is excessive and disruptive of social peace when not balanced by the general dignity owed all human beings, that is, when it makes the basic differences inherent in human activity matters of kind rather than matters of degree. 4. Distributive Justice and Rectifying Justice We might well divide up the field of human dignity into two sorts: one sort for everyone, the other sort for some but not for others. And we might then say that this first sort of human dignity is because of who one is, and



on human dignity

77

the second sort of human dignity is because of what one does. Moreover, if the issue of human dignity is a matter of justice, then the essential distinction and interrelation of these two sorts of human dignity might be better formulated by adopting and adapting Aristotle’s classical distinction between rectifying justice and distributive justice. So let us see how the dignity owed to all persons because of who they are is a matter of rectifying justice, and the dignity owed to some persons because of what they do is a matter of distributive justice. In his profound discussion of justice in the fifth book of the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle states: Particular justice . . . is divided into two kinds. One kind is exercised in the distribution of honour [timēs], wealth, and the other divisible assets [dianomais] of the community, which may be allotted among its members in equal or unequal shares. The other kind is that which supplies a corrective principle [diorthōtikōn] in private transactions.7

He then goes on to make a further distinction between the two sorts of justice. Concerning distributive justice he says: [Distributive] justice involves at least four terms, namely, two persons for whom it is just and two shares which are just . . . All are agreed that justice in distributions must be based on desert of some sort [kat’ axian tina] . . . Justice is therefore a sort of proportion [analogon ti] . . . proportion being equality of ratios [analogia isotēs].8

In other words, in distributive justice, one is to get from society in proportion to what one contributes to the common good of that society. But with rectifying justice, the equality involved is more direct. Thus Aristotle goes on to say: But the just in private transactions, although it is equal in a sense (and the unjust the unequal), is not the equal according to geometrical but according to arithmetical proportion [kata tēn arithmetikēn]. For it makes no difference whether a good man has defrauded a bad man or a bad one a good one . . . the law looks only at the nature of the damage, treating the parties as equal [hōs isois], and merely asking whether one has done and the other suffered injustice.9

7 Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics [Eth. Nic.] 5,2, 1130b 30–35 (trans. H. Rackham; Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1926), 266–67. 8 Ibid., 5.2, 1131a 20–35, pp. 268–69. 9 Ibid., 5.4, 1132a 1–5, pp. 274–75.

78

on human dignity

In order for this definition of twofold justice to be adaptable to our current situation regarding the right to human dignity, one point in Aristotle needs to be clarified or even supplemented. That is, it is somewhat unclear whether Aristotle would consider an affront to the dignity of another person, let us say what we now call “hate speech,” whether that would be a violation of distributive justice or of rectifying justice. Since Aristotle speaks of “honor” [timē] in the context of distributive justice, it would seem, then, its violation [what we would call a violation of one’s dignity] is a matter of what Aristotle calls “legal” justice [nomikon].10 This form of justice consists of “the rules of justice based on convention [kata synthēkēn] and expediency . . . like standard measures.”11 They are rules and even systems of rules “ordained not by nature but by man [mē physika alla anthrōpina] and not the same in all places, since forms of government are not the same.”12 And, as we have seen, Aristotle emphasizes that there is general agreement that distributive justice is to be based on desert, but the definition of desert will vary from society to society depending on how a society defines for itself its own social goals, that is, what its own common good is. Thus violations of one’s honor or dignity are matters of social status, and one’s social status is determined by what one’s society posits to be of greater or lesser value for the sake of its common good. That idea of the common good is what becomes the standard for social evaluation in that society. Here, of course, there are great differences between what one society values in its citizens and what another society values in its citizens. So, there is a difference between the way a particular society will treat an affront to one person’s honor as distinct from another person’s honor, and that will depend on what Aristotle has called “proportion.”13 That is, a person’s right to honor is in proportion to his value to his society, which means his contribution to what his society considers valuable to or enhancing of its common good. For Aristotle, at this level anyway, society is to be a meritocracy. When speaking of Aristotle, I purposely use the male pronoun “his” here rather than the more currently accepted “his or her,” since, for Aristotle, it is doubtful whether a woman can be the object of either an assault on her own dignity or a recognition of her own dignity. For him, it would 10 Ibid., 5.6, 1134b 20; also, ibid., 5.5, 1133a 30–35. 11  Ibid., 5.6, 1134b 35, pp. 296–97. 12 Ibid., 5.7, 1135a 4, pp. 296–97. 13 For Aristotle, it seems that one can only be guilty of insolent acts (hybris) when the object of those acts is somebody of superior social status. See Politics [Pol.], 5.8, 1311a 34 and 1312a 1.



on human dignity

79

seem, that any such denial or any such affirmation would be relative to her status as either the wife, daughter, or sister of a freeman.14 In other words, the denial or the affirmation of her dignity is a matter of insulting or respecting a man’s domestic domain. Moreover, a slave, who was part of a man’s domestic domain, is not considered worthy, even relatively speaking, of having anyone (including him- or herself ) morally object to violations of his or her honor. A slave has no honor because a slave qua slave cannot be a member of the polis.15 Therefore, who one is in this society depends on what one does for the values this society has designated for itself. That explains why an assault on one’s dignity is a matter of distributive justice, and why the right to redress for such an assault will vary from one member of that particular society to another. In fact, some members of that society were not considered worthy of being the subjects of any such a redress at all. Finally, from all of this we can conclude that if only some members of one’s own society merit respect of their dignity, then it would seem that those who are totally outside that society have no claims upon members of that society to respect their dignity at all (a fortiori). Most of us, though, find that sort of elementary exclusionary discrimination morally offensive. In fact, in Aristotle’s day, to have no politically constituted status within the polis meant that one was leading a less than human life.16 What we now need to do is to utilize Aristotle’s designation of respect for one’s dignity to be a matter of distributive justice for some dignity claims, but seek another reason for designating other dignity claims to be a matter of rectifying justice. This will, I think, enable us to designate at least some dignity claims to be the claims of a human person per se, that is, a matter of who one is in general rather than what one does specifically for one’s own society. For, whereas distributive justice by definition is specific to a society there are aspects of rectifying justice that even Aristotle would have to admit are “natural”; that is, it is a standard of justice that is “natural [physikon] that has the same validity everywhere, and does not depend on our accepting it or not.”17 Surely, a physical assault on oneself or one’s property which is the subject of a tort, is something natural— something that is ubiquitous and unchanging (akinēton).18 In other words, could one find a human society anywhere, worthy of any rational person’s .

14 See ibid., 5.8, 1131a 35–39. 15 See ibid., 3.5, 1278a 1–3. 16 See ibid., 1.1, 1253a 29. 17 Eth. Nic., 5.7, 1134b 20. 18 Ibid., 5.7, 1134b 25.

80

on human dignity

moral respect, where torts are not the subject of legal redress? And could one find a human society anywhere, worthy of any rational person’s moral respect, that makes the redress of torts different for different citizens depending on their social status? Shouldn’t a tort be judged the same whether the body or the property injured is that of a rich person or of a poor one, that of somebody of high social status or of low social status? Including an assault on one’s dignity within tort law could enable us to save a general idea of the dignity to all human persons, without having to ignore the dignity or social recognition due the socially beneficial achievements of some persons more than others. Furthermore, including the issue of basic human dignity within the sphere of rectifying justice does not limit the overall question of human dignity per se to that sphere alone, since law or legislation or public policy needs to be concerned with issues of distributive justice as well. Like justice that has two related spheres, one more general and one more specific, so does human dignity have two related spheres: one more general and one more specific. And, as we saw above, both spheres are needed for a human culture that encourages both human commonality and human individuality. Surely, a culture that only emphasizes commonality over individuality or a culture that emphasizes individuality over commonality would be humanly deficient. 5. Honor and Dishonor in Talmudic Law Following our original reference to the Greek, Hebrew, and Latin contributions to the idea of human dignity, we have just drawn upon a Greek source. Let us now draw upon a Hebrew source. In talmudic law, an assault on the honor or dignity of another person is the equivalent of a tort: it is to be redressed monetarily.19 Now a tort can be committed against one’s property or against one’s body. In those cases, the amount of the damage is to be assessed and appropriate monetary restitution is to be paid to the damaged victim. In the case of damage to property, that is easy: it is the cost of replacement. In the case of bodily damage, though, it is harder to assess. So, what was worked out in talmudic law is that the court is to assess the functional value of the bodily part damaged, that is, the differential between the amount one could sell his or her services for with that bodily part functioning and

19 See m. Bava Qamma [B. Qam.] 8:1.



on human dignity

81

the amount one could sell his or her services for without that bodily part functioning.20 But how does one assess the damage to one’s self-esteem or one’s reputation caused by an insulting assault on one’s human dignity? That amount to be paid would have to be arbitrary inasmuch as there is no way to measure that loss as one could measure the loss of property or bodily function. There is a debate among the talmudic sages as to whether all such verbal assaults on one’s dignity (kvodo) are to be equally redressed, regardless of who has been harmed or who harmed that person, or whether a distinction is to be made based on who committed the assault (called ha-mevayyesh, “the insulting one”) against whom (called ha-mitbayyesh, “the insulted one”). Now Rabbi Meir is of the opinion that no distinction is to be made, that all victims of an assault on their dignity are entitled to the same redress.21 The other sages insist that distinctions in status be the determining factor when assessing damages in this intangible area of human interaction. Based on the principle of majority rule (in this case the majority of the sages), later authorities accepted the differentiating opinion of the sages.22 Nevertheless, even though this somewhat hierarchal view of human relationships lies behind the law (which, in principle anyway, could be repealed by even later authorities), it is still assumed that even the least members of the community are entitled to some significant damages in the event of their being degraded or insulted in public. Thus the influential 12th-century jurist, Maimonides, states: “One who embarrasses even a resident-alien or a slave is liable for damages.”23 While a slave (who even in those days was more like an indentured servant) is considered to be part of the community (unlike Aristotle’s view, as we have seen), a “resident-alien” (ger) is simply a gentile who has committed him- or herself to basic moral law (for example, the prohibitions of murder, robbery, and incest) and not to blaspheme against the God of Israel, and to accept the sovereignty of the Jewish community in which he or she was now living in good faith.24 This person is not a member of the Jewish community and, unlike a slave, he or she is not required to observe any specifically Jewish religious practices. Clearly, the protection of the

20 Ibid. 21  See b. B. Qam. 86a. Here he seems to follow the generally egalitarian view of this teacher Rabbi Aqiva (see m. B. Qam. 8:6). See, also, Maimonides, Mishneh Torah: Assault and Damage 3.7 re m. Avot 3:11. 22 See ibid., 3.1, 5. 23 Ibid., 3.3. 24 See b. Avodah Zarah 64b.

82

on human dignity

human dignity of this person is because of his or her universal human status. This general requirement is what the Talmud calls kvod ha-beriyot, “the honor due all human creatures.”25 Of course, the best reason for this whole approach to human dignity is that all humans are the special creatures of God (who have been called in the West imago Dei). Yet one can (and should) infer that reason from this idea of human dignity and the way it has operated in the development of Jewish law rather than be required to affirm ab initio just who the source granting that human dignity is.26 One does not have to deduce this idea as a conclusion from that theological doctrine as a premise. Therefore, one need not be a religious believer to appreciate the human value of this idea, even though a religious believer has a better reason for that initial appreciation than a more secularly inclined person has. Understanding and agreeing with the reason of a prescribed or proscribed act enables one to perform it or desist from performing it with greater intelligence. Nevertheless, such understanding and acceptance is not the conditio sine qua non for the proper performance of an act that is a transaction between two human beings; rather, it is its conditio per quam, its ultimate justification. In the rabbinic tradition, the issue of human dignity is a concern of both rectifying and distributive justice. We have just seen how an assault on the honor of almost anybody (boshet) is subject to redress like a tort is subject to such redress, thus making it primarily a matter of rectifying justice. Although a number of jurists confined this culpable act to cases where there was actual physical contact between the two parties—for example, A spit in the face of B in public—some other jurists expanded this culpability to include verbal abuse as well.27 However, this is not the whole story here since we still need to know just what prohibition has been violated when one assaults the dignity of another human being. In talmudic law, a prohibition cannot be assumed just because an act is culpable and punishable by law. There must be an explicit prohibition which the one who performed the culpable act has violated. And, in the case of an assault on somebody else, be that assault physical or verbal, the prohibition must have been violated knowingly. As such, that prohibition must be readily knowable. As the Talmud would put it: “We have heard 25 See b. Berakhot [Ber.] 19b and parallels. 26 See D. Novak, Natural Law in Judaism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 164–73. 27 See m. Bava Metzi‘a [B. Metzi‘a] 4:10.



on human dignity

83

the punishment [onesh sham’anu], where is the prohibition [azharah minnayin]?”28 Furthermore, there is a distinction between the prohibition of assaulting somebody else’s human dignity and the injunction to actively affirm somebody else’s human dignity. The former is a negative commandment or proscription; the latter is a positive commandment or mandate. And, finally, all of the above is a matter of rectifying justice. But, is there a kind of distributive justice in the rabbinic tradition, and if so, does it include the issue of the honor due some other human beings as distinct from others? As for the negative commandment, which is the prohibition to degrade or insult somebody else, two biblical prohibitions have been suggested. The first is: “You shall not curse [lo teqallel] a deaf-mute” (Lev 19:14).29 The second is: “Judges you shall not curse [lo teqallel], and a prince among your people you shall not revile” (Exod 22:26), concluding that one is not to act contemptuously against those of either high station or low station.30 This might well be a prohibition of something more than an actual curse, since the Hebrew verb qallel means “to make light of,” that is, to belittle the dignity of another person, whoever he or she might be. And, even though the Talmud emphasizes that these victims of such verbal denigration are “among your people,” the 2nd-century c.e. sage, Ben Azzai expanded this prohibition to include all other human beings: “Do not despise [al tehi vaz] any other human being [le-khol adam].”31 Furthermore, some have located the prohibition in this biblical commandment: “You shall not oppress [lo tonu] your neighbour” (Lev 25:17). Since another commandment close by prohibits what is clearly monetary oppression of somebody else (“You shall not oppress your brother” [Lev 25:14]), the second prohibition of “oppression” is deemed by the rabbis to be “verbal oppression” (ona’at devarim), such as ridiculing somebody’s ethnic origins or reminding someone of a less than virtuous past.32 And even the commandment to admonish somebody else for what one believes to be his or her immoral conduct (“You shall surely admonish your neighbour”—Lev 19:17) does not include any public humiliation of that person.33 And, if that person is likely to resent such admonition, then it seems that regard

28 See b. Sanhedrin 54a. 29 See b. Shevu‘ot 36a. 30 Mekhilta: de-Kaspa thereon. 31  m. Avot 4:3. 32 See b. B. Metzi‘a 58b. 33 See b. Arakhin 16b.

84

on human dignity

for his or her dignity relieves one of the obligation to so admonish him or her at all.34 As for a positive admonition to actively affirm the dignity of another person, the words of the 2nd-century c.e. sage, Rabbi Eliezer ben Hyrcanus, “Let the honour of your fellow person [kvod haverakh] be as precious to you as your own,” seem to be a paraphrase of the biblical commandment “You shall love your neighbour as yourself ” (Lev 19:18).35 Furthermore, by his use of the very general haverakh, “your fellow,” Rabbi Eliezer seems to be of the opinion that the “neigbour” (rʿekha) in “you shall love your neighbour as yourself ” refers to all other human beings. That also seems to have been the opinion of Ben Azzai (just cited above), who was a student of Rabbi Eliezer.36 We now have both a prohibition of assaulting the human dignity of another person in both physical deed and word, plus a positive commandment to actively affirm that human dignity in all others. The only difference between the negative commandment and the positive commandment is that one can be sued in a court of law for violating somebody’s human dignity, but one cannot be sued in a court of law for not affirming somebody’s dignity. However, in the divine court, the punishment for not affirming somebody else’s dignity, like the punishment for not performing any other positive commandment, might be much more severe.37 And, if a person’s conscience is well formed, that trial before the divine court has already begun in his or her mind. We now need to look at honor (kavod) as a matter of distributive justice in talmudic law. Aside from a certain amount of elementary decency to which every human being has a right, and thus when overtly denied becomes a matter calling for rectification (by either humans or God), the positive honor due any human being is more for what he or she has done than for what he or she is as a human being. This can be seen in a talmudic discussion about the meaning of the biblical commandment: “You shall rise up before the aged [seivah], and you shall honour [ve-hadarta] the presence of the elder [zaqen]” (Lev 19:32). Now it would seem that the two halves of this commandment are in apposition to one other, namely, rising before the aged is the equivalent of honoring the elder. However, as 34 See b. Yevamot 65b re Prov 9:8. 35 m. Avot 2:10. 36 See y. Ned. 9:3/14c re Gen 5:1. 37 See Maimonides, Mishneh Torah: Assault and Damage 3.7.



on human dignity

85

is often the case in talmudic interpretation, biblical redundancy is taken to be apparent rather than real. So, in this verse, then, each half of the verse is speaking of somebody different from the person mentioned in the other half. The second half refers to an “elder” (zaqen), which is interpreted to mean a person who has acquired wisdom (hokhmah), whatever his or her age. The first half, though, refers to an aged person, and the sage Isi ben Judah insists that this commandment concerning “the aged one” (seivah) means any aged person, Jew or Gentile.38 This seems to be a matter of distributive justice since we are to honor the elder for what he or she has done, which is to acquire wisdom. That wisdom consists of knowledge of and insight in the wisdom of the Torah and the Jewish tradition. These are supposed to be qualities that are of value to the Jewish community, since that community’s identity and function in the world are constituted for it by the Torah. But Torah knowledge must be acquired and distributed among the members of the community, and that is the socially valuable task of the scholars of the Torah. Everyone is their student, whether directly or indirectly. Standing in their presence is the way the members of the community are to pay them honor for their dignified achievements. But what has an ordinary person accomplished by simply having lived a long life that entitles him or her to similar respect? The answer is supplied by Isi ben Judah, the same sage who distinguished between “the aged” and “the elder.” He said every old person is deserving of such respect because of the amount of life experience he or she has acquired.39 In other words, we must learn from the formal wisdom of the learned “elder” acquired from books, and from the informal wisdom of the “age,” wisdom acquired from the school of life itself. Surely this is of value to the community since old people are important resources for understanding the history of the community and how it has come to be what it now is. Only when an aged person has become very senile is positive respect impossible to pay to them, since they often have to be treated like little children; yet they are still to be treated according to the standards of basic human decency which, as we have seen above, involve refraining from contemptuous words or deeds.40 But, even here, one can give such infirm 38 See b. Qiddushin [Qidd.] 32b–33a. 39 Ibid., 33a. 40 See Maimonides, Mishneh Torah: Rebellion 6.10 and note of Rabbi David ibn Zimra (Radbaz) thereon.

86

on human dignity

old people the type of care that is still mindful of who they once were for us in the world.41 Finally, there is a certain restraint that must be exercised for the sake of the honor due both the sages and the aged in any civilized society. This comes out in the rabbinic interpretation of this biblical verse: “When you see the ox of your brother or his sheep driven away and you have hidden yourself from them, do return them to your brother” (Deut 22:1). It would seem from the prima facie meaning of this verse that the phrase “and you have hidden yourself from them” refers to the easy temptation not to trouble with somebody else’s business, a temptation one should resist by making the effort to return the lost livestock to a fellow citizen. However, this phrase can also be a positive admonition, namely, “do hide yourself [ve-hitalamta] from them” That is, there are “some of them” (mehem) who may hide themselves from this duty. By employing this interpretation, the rabbis now teach that there are certain persons who are exempt from the obligation, involving as it does considerable effort, to restore lost livestock to their owners. Such a person would be an elder (zaqen), for whom such an undertaking is “not according to his dignity” (le-fi kvodo).42 In other words, considerations of the honor or dignity due an elder is enough reason to declare him or her exempt from this kind of involvement, something that would be expected of a more ordinary person in that society. And the same sort of reasoning is employed in exempting women from having to personally appear in court in a civil dispute, because the dignity of a woman (literally “all the honour due a princess”) would be denigrated were she forced to appear in the rough and tumble public business conducted in court.43 Interestingly enough, though, both of these exemptions from public duty may be waived by these two “dignified” parties if any of them decides for whatever reason that they do not want to claim such respect from others.44 It seems that is because the social statuses recognized by these exemptions are very much dependent on public opinion in a society at a certain time. So, for example, many women today would not claim such an exemption, based as it is on the exclusively domestic role of women

41 See b. Ber, 8b and parallels. 42 See b. B. Metzi‘a 30a. 43 See b. Shevuot 30a re Ps 45:14; and Tosafot, s.v. “kol” thereon. 44 Since special treatment due to one’s dignity is considered one’s right, such a person often has the right to waive this right, i.e., this claim on being honored by others. See b. Qidd. 32b.



on human dignity

87

in ancient times, since in more recent times most women have much more public involvement now. Thus the honor a person is permitted to claim for him- or herself because of his or her social status, that largely depends on what a society values at a particular time. And it also depends on whether those persons that society has so honored for their valuable status really do regard that status to be beneficial to themselves and to the others whose duty it is to render such honor.45 6. Virtue and Honorable Action In conclusion, I turn to the tradition of Roman law on the issue of human dignity as we have formulated it so far. In the digest of the 3rd-century Roman jurist Ulpian, he characterizes Roman law as follows: “The basic principles of law are these: to live honourably [honeste vivere], not to harm another [alterum non laedere], and to confer on each person his due [suum cuique tribuere].”46 What is similar in the Roman legal tradition, the Greek philosophical tradition, and the Jewish theological tradition, is that the law intends the cultivation of personal virtue by all those who are the subjects of the law’s rights and responsibilities. In the text cited above, we see a progression, that is, the one who lives with honor or personal integrity, who is concerned with his or her public reputation, will be one who does not harm others, and who renders to each person what he or she deserves. Thus the life of the law does not begin with society, either with those who make the laws or with those who enforce the laws. The life of the law begins with the personal lives of those who are asked to live according to the law. Thus Aristotle says that “the actions that spring from virtue [aretē] in general are in the main identical with the actions that are according to law [nomos], since the law enjoins conduct displaying the various particular virtues and forbids conduct displaying the various particular vices.”47 And the Bible speaks of the law being “good for you” (the word for “you,” lakh, being singular—Deut 10:13). Therefore, from this personal integrity flows one’s avoidance of harming others, by deed or by word, which as we have seen, is the business of rectifying justice. And from it flows one’s sense of what is due others, especially what honor or dignity is due different 45 See, e.g., b. Menahot 33a; and Rashi, s.v. “ha-hu pitha” thereon. 46 Digest 1.1.10.1. See Plato, Republic 331e. 47 Eth. Nic. 5.2/1130b 23–25, pp. 264–65.

88

on human dignity

people for the different things they have done for the common good, which as we have seen, is the business of distributive justice. In other words, human dignity can only be effectively affirmed for other human persons by those human persons who are themselves dignified in their attitudes and in their actions. Human dignity will only be advanced when those of us who have a right to it learn how to exercise that right correctly, and learn why we have been given that right at all. And human dignity will only be advanced when those of us who are duty-bound to respect it learn how to perform our duty correctly, and learn why we have been given this duty at all. For this task, we need the law to be our teacher, to reward dignity and discourage indignity, and to show us that dignity in ourselves and others contributes greatly to the common good, and that indignity in ourselves and others greatly detracts from the common good.

Interview with David Novak July 26, 2012 Hava Tirosh-Samuelson Professor Novak, You are an ordained rabbi, a professor of Jewish philosophy, a theologian, a social and political theorist, as well as a bioethicist. Please tell us about your training and intellectual trajectory, your upbringing, and your education. I came from a nominally Jewish home. My parents were members of a Reform congregation, and it was in that synagogue (called “temple”) where I celebrated my bar mitzvah. Though they weren’t antireligious, Judaism wasn’t something that was important to them. They sent me to Hebrew school in order to prepare me for bar mitzvah. All the other kids hated it; I loved it. And one thing led to another. I had an older cousin, probably the most observant member of the family, who taught me how to put on tefillin (i.e., phylacteries), which I began to do regularly about a month or so before my bar mitzvah. After my bar mitzvah I met with the rabbi of the Reform congregation and told him I didn’t want to be a Reform Jew. To my surprise, he said he respected my decision, telling me that he had come from an Orthodox family, but decided as a young man to become a Reform Jew, indeed a Reform rabbi. So I began to attend the local Conservative synagogue, and soon thereafter began worshiping regularly with an Orthodox minyan that met in that synagogue, and participated in their wonderful Talmud class that met every week after the Shabbat morning service. The men of that minyan and Talmud class were wonderful role models for me as a teenager. I revere their memory. I became more and more involved in Jewish life and Jewish learning. During high school I went for a year to what was then called the College of Jewish Studies, which was a modern institution where I learned Tanach and Hebrew. And I also went to what was then called the Chicago Yeshiva, the Hebrew Theological College. I didn’t like that too much and I persuaded my father to hire me a tutor. The tutor was Rabbi Curt Peritz, a German rabbi, who was trained in the famous yeshiva in Pressburg (until 1919 in Hungary). Rabbi Moses Sofer, also known as Hatam Sofer, who is considered to be the founder of Orthodoxy in the nineteenth century, founded this yeshiva. Although Pressburg at that time was already

90

interview with david novak

called Bratislava (now in Slovakia) in what was then called Czechoslovakia, Rabbi Peritz was very much a German Rabbi, and this fact would become most relevant to my upbringing. As a child I heard German as my first language, and later studied German in school. With Rabbi Peritz I spoke German as well, even though he wanted to speak English (which he spoke quite well). In addition, I spoke German with Frau Bella Stern, who was a widow (originally from Bavaria) who served kosher meals in her home for religiously observant Jewish students at the University of Chicago. From Rabbi Peritz and Frau Stern (who was a member of his congregation) I learned some of the beautiful traditions that characterized German-Jewish piety. I carry them with me to this day. In high school, there was a program at the University of Chicago which no longer exists now, called the Early Entrant Program, that enabled one to take the entrance exam to the university during the second year of high school. I took the exam and was admitted to the University of Chicago. That worked out well because Rabbi Peritz also lived in the neighborhood of the University. So while I studied at the University of Chicago for four years, I also learned Talmud with Rabbi Peritz. My original major at the University of Chicago was Classics. I decided that, if the Torah is true, which I believe it is, and it has everything in it, then its greatest competitor was (and maybe still is) Greek wisdom. This is the classic framework of the relationship between “Athens and Jerusalem.” So I majored in Classics, especially in Greek, and became interested in things philosophical. I especially got turned on to philosophy by one of the most extraordinary figures in twentieth-century thought and Jewish thought, Leo Strauss. Leo Strauss did not teach undergraduate courses, but he allowed me to sit in some of his graduate courses. Strauss was very interesting because no one ever knew exactly what his Jewish commitment was, but I remember him telling me that I should continue studying Talmud. That he considered the fact that he did not have a yeshiva-type background of studying the Talmud regularly—I mean, he knew how to look things up, obviously—to be the great lacuna in his education. And I found Strauss, especially inspiring, not for the usual reasons that inspired his disciples, but for the questions he raised, and also because he was quite proudly Jewish. At the University of Chicago, there were very few students who were religiously observant or even interested in Judaism, even though many happened to be Jewish by birth. The thing about Strauss that impressed me most in this class was that if any student, especially any Jewish student, spoke of the Jewish tradition with any disrespect, Strauss’s answer to them, as he cut him with a smile on his face, in so many words, was something like this: “What your



interview with david novak

91

connection to the Jewish tradition is, that’s your personal choice. But as for the Jewish tradition, it is more impressive both morally and intellectually than anything you have ever been, ever are, or ever will be.” And to me, that was a Kiddush Ha-Shem, a sanctification of the divine name. Whether Strauss believed in God or not, I don’t know, but to me he was a godsend, being a student who felt very lonely as an observant Jew at the University of Chicago in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Through Strauss I became interested in natural law theory, which covers philosophy and political theory. However, Strauss said to me, “I am not a natural law theorist. If you are interested in natural law, you should go study with Yves Simon.” Yves Simon was a French Catholic philosopher who had a joint appointment with the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago and the University of Notre Dame. He was really the star student of Jacques Maritain (the greatest modern Thomist philosopher), and like his teacher he was an antifascist. Both Maritain and Simon left France before its fall and remained in the United States. Maritain returned to France, Simon never really did. And in 1961 I enrolled in his last seminar, when he was dying of cancer. He was in great physical pain, and I was deeply impressed by his courage. He was an extraordinary man, but not only as a thinker. There was a purity about him, an intellectual and even spiritual purity. Many years later I met Simon’s son who is a retired U.S. Foreign Service officer, who established a foundation in memory of his father at the University of Notre Dame. When we first met, he became quite emotional when I recalled his father so favorably. In 1960 I read a book by a Jesuit philosopher/theologian named John Courtney Murray called We Hold These Truths, which basically argued that the founding of America was not based upon atheism, or Enlightenment rationalism, but it was really based upon a kind of a natural law, namely natural rights tradition. I was very impressed with the book because that year I also read Leo Strauss’s Natural Right in History. I wondered why aren’t we Jews writing books about Judaism that way? Why are we Jews only writing books about what people said in the past? Jews who were at that time writing about current things were disdainful of the Jewish tradition and felt that they had liberated themselves from it. So I thought to myself, “Maybe, maybe that will be my goal in life,” namely, to do what John Courtney Murray did, philosophically and theologically. That is to say, to introduce the wisdom of the Jewish tradition into general philosophical and political theoretical and ethical discussion. After graduating from the University of Chicago, I entered the Jewish Theological Seminary, because I always wanted to be a rabbi. (I married my wife, Melva, after my second year in the Seminary, and we now have

92

interview with david novak

two children and five grandchildren.) During my third year there, I was admitted to a special program in Jewish philosophy with Professor Abraham Joshua Heschel. This was a special seminar, whose students were excused from all of the regular classes except Bible and Talmud. During the years I was enrolled in the seminar it had four main members who would later become major scholars of Jewish Thought: the late Sol Tanenzapf, Arthur Green, Reuven Kimelman, and myself. In a regular classroom, Professor Heschel, truth be told, was not that dynamic or impressive, or even interesting. But in a seminar with handpicked students, he just shone. He used to sit at the head of the table: on one side of the table were sitting Tanenzapf and myself, because we were considered to be the rationalists (Tanenzapf at the time was writing his PhD dissertation in philosophy at Yale), whereas on the other side sat Kimelman and Green, who were interested in Kabbalah, mysticism, and Jewish spirituality. Professor Heschel would play us off against each other in a very, very creative way. He had an extraordinary influence on me, although my way of thinking is very different from the way he thought. (He once told me he hoped that the Aristotelians with whom I studied at the University of Chicago had not “hampered” my thinking.) We learned a lot from him. The main lesson was that Jewish philosophical questions are existential questions. They are important questions, they are not questions of simply who said what when. I also learned much, both during my days in the Seminary and afterwards, from Professor Saul Lieberman (considered to have been the greatest rabbinics scholar in the world), to whom I would frequently question about the meaning of difficult Talmudic and Midrashic texts. His learning coupled with his piety was inspiring (even though he had little use for philosophy). I remember Professor Heschel telling us the wonderful story of Moritz Steinschneider, the great Jewish bibliographer of the nineteenth century who, when a young man came to him and he asked him what his profession was, the young man said, “I’m a Hebrew poet.” So Steinschneider said to him, “And when did you live?” The past tense says it all. For Steinschneider, people were significant only in the past, as past authors. For Steinschneider, too, philosophy was something Jews did in the past. But not so for Professor Heschel, for whom philosophy was an existential engagement. The status of Jewish philosophy at the time was very problematic. The main book on Jewish philosophy—Isaac Husik’s A History of Medieval Jewish Philosophy (1916)—was a learned book, but not a good book, and therein Husik categorically declared: “There’s no such thing as Jewish philosophy. It’s dead.” Ironically enough, this book was



interview with david novak

93

published when Franz Rosenzweig was writing The Star of Redemption, the book that would come to dominate Jewish philosophy in the twentieth century. So this is an example of what Hegel called “the cunning of history.” History gets its revenge. Out of that seminar in Jewish philosophy, I was the only one who really went into the rabbinate. I always wanted to be a rabbi. And I followed the advice Professor Heschel gave me: “When you finish the seminary and go into the rabbinate, don’t take off a year before going into a PhD program because a year would become two years, or even three years. Go right into a graduate program.” I had applied to the program in Philosophy of Religion at Harvard and was accepted there, but I couldn’t find a rabbinic position in the Boston area within commuting distance of Harvard. Then I discovered, because of my interest in Natural Law Theory (which at the time only Catholics seemed to be interested in), that there was a man at Georgetown University (an officially Jesuit institution) in Washington named Heinrich Albert Rommen, who had written a book called Die Ewige Wiederkehr des Naturrechts, (The Eternal Return of Natural Law), which is an extraordinary book. The thing that impressed me most was not only the book itself, but the fact that Rommen, as a German Catholic thinker, had been expelled by Hitler in 1937. For me that meant that his ethical theory was not only something he had thought, but something that he had practiced; as we would say, he had put his money where his mouth was. At that time I found a rabbinic position in Washington in a small congregation. I also became the Jewish Chaplain in Saint Elizabeth’s Hospital, the federal mental hospital, in the days in the late 1960s when Lyndon Johnson was spending all kinds of government money on welfare programs. So the government paid my tuition in graduate school at Georgetown and I was allowed to take all of the courses necessary for psychiatric residence, which was invaluable for being a rabbi, let me tell you. I did not know about this training, but it sheds very interesting light on your philosophical work. And at that time I didn’t realize that Rommen was dying of cancer. In fact, he died during my first semester at Georgetown, which left me wondering what I was to do. But, at that time I met a younger professor at Georgetown by the name of Germain Grisez, who later became a leading Catholic moral theorist. And I discovered we had something very interesting in common. He had done his PhD at Chicago with Richard McKeon, who had also been my teacher of Aristotle. As two University of Chicago

94

interview with david novak

graduates, both having studied with some of the same teachers, we hit off quite well. I wrote my dissertation on “Suicide and Morality in Plato, Aquinas, and Kant.” It combined my clinical experience in the hospital with my philosophical and theoretical interests. The dissertation was subsequently published as a book and was largely based on my observation that, in the hospital, there were great clinicians who really didn’t understand why they were doing what they were doing. Conversely, scholars in the university had great theoretical skills, but no clue about life. So I tried to combine the two factors. During the following years I held other rabbinic positions, but I never took a congregation that wouldn’t give me a lot of time to do my own intellectual work. As a rabbi, I always taught part-time in places such as Oklahoma City University, the New School for Social Research in New York, Baruch College of the City University of New York, and the Jewish Theological Seminary. In my late forties, when my youngest child was just going off to a university, I was no longer tied down to one particular place and could now pursue my academic interests full-time. When the new Bronfman Chair at the University of Virginia opened up, I applied for it and got it. I spent seven and a half very happy years at Virginia, and then I assumed the position at the University of Toronto, where I have been for the past sixteen years. The position at the University of Toronto offered a lot more than the one at the University of Virginia because Toronto is a big city and both my wife and I are big-city people. The Jewish community of Toronto is excellent because of its diversity and the presence of a Jewish intelligentsia. There are also some very good Talmudic scholars here in Toronto, with whom I have a study group that meets every Friday morning. We meet at the home of a major financier, who is also a fine Talmud scholar, and we benefit from his incredible private library. This library includes many medieval responsa, namely, the answers of medieval rabbis to queries about Jewish law. The immersion with these texts led me to become more interested in biomedical issues, since some of them deal with issues that would become in our time major legal and political issues in general society. And, because I had become a Canadian citizen, in 2006 I was appointed to a federal panel dealing with “assisted human reproduction.” The involvement in biomedical issues actually began in 1973 with the famous Supreme Court decision known as Roe vs. Wade. The decision virtually permitted elective abortion, and some of my Catholic colleagues asked me, “What is the Jewish position on abortion?” I actually worked



interview with david novak

95

out the Jewish approach to the problem of abortion, even though there is no one or the Jewish position on abortion. Nobody within the Jewish tradition can say that a person has a right to an abortion; there has to be a reason for it. Conversely, nobody can say that abortion is totally prohibited in Judaism either. So the Jewish view depends on interpretation; there are those who are strict and those who are more lenient; and I’m one of the stricter interpreters. My view on abortion has certainly been influenced by my contacts with Catholic theologians, but this is not because of my pandering to the Catholics as some of my Jewish critics have charged. I also have certain differences with Catholics. If we happen to agree on a given issue, then we happen to agree. In addition to the debate on abortion, I got involved in certain other issues, not because I’m a political activist, but because people call upon me and ask my opinion. In this regard I am quite similar to my teacher, Germain Grisez. This great moral theorist wrote a book of nine hundred of his responsa on practical moral questions. Now, he is a conservative Catholic, albeit not a priest. And his book generated a lot of heated responses. Once when he was lecturing at some liberal Catholic seminary a nun stood up and started screaming at him: “Who are you to tell people what to do? Who are you to tell people what to do?” And he answered, “Because they ask me.” I, too, get involved in heated moral controversies because people ask for my opinion. I’ve been involved with certain controversial halakhic issues because of internal debates within Conservative Judaism during the 1980s. When the Conservative Movement considered the admission of women to the rabbinate, I cofounded the Union for Traditional Judaism in 1983 (and left the Conservative Movement completely a few years later). I am now president and the coordinator for the panel of halakhic inquiry of that organization. (Actually, we were not opposed to women functioning as rabbis deciding questions of Jewish law, instead we were concerned that the Conservative Movement is not committed to the unequivocal authority of halakha and is ambivalent about halakha’s foundation in divine revelation, hence their willingness to override a number of serious traditional impediments to their unambivalent embrace of egalitarianism.) I have published some of my responsa (teshuvot), in Hebrew and in English, taking a stand on a variety of debated issues. So that is how I came to occupy the position I find myself in today: an academic scholar, a social theorist, a rabbinic leader, and a theologian.

96

interview with david novak

I would like to explore further your experiences in a Christian institution such as Georgetown, including your contribution to Jewish-Christian relations. You’ve been exposed, for example, to systematic Catholic theology. So how, and in what way, has it impacted the way you understand Jewish philosophy or Jewish theology? As I already mentioned, a third of my dissertation was on Thomas Aquinas. Was he a philosopher or was he a theologian? How do we distinguish between philosophy and theology? It seems to me that a theologian (or at least the type of theologian that I’m interested in) is somebody who philosophizes about a religious tradition to which he or she is personally committed. The question then is what happens when a religious tradition becomes a proper subject for philosophical study? Some people, like Leo Strauss and his disciples, would argue that a philosopher by definition is not a theologian and vice versa, but I don’t accept that at all. I think that, as Harry Wolfson pointed out in a famous essay, “The Talmudic Student of Texts,” the rabbinic-thinking Jews basically approached the Torah and the tradition like scientific data, examining it from every angle. Maimonides said that the Torah is a creation of God, like nature is a creation of God. Since the Torah was given to people already in the created natural world to govern human action here, the same scientific (broadly conceived) methods for understanding created nature should be used to understand the Torah. That is why I don’t see a difference between theology and philosophy as methods of understanding data in the world, whether natural or revealed. Now, the perceived difference between philosophy and theology emerges because people think that theology is dogmatic theology. To make a dogmatic statement (i.e., “this is what you must believe or you must affirm”) is to make certain doctrines have legal authority, thus being placed beyond dispute, as it were. So, in that sense, when a theologian speaks that way, he is really speaking like a halakhist, namely, a Jewish jurist. But other than the representation of certain dogmas (and they are quite few), the question is whether one can be philosophically objective about something to which one is personally committed. This question was heatedly debated in universities when they opened up departments of Religious Studies. We had this debate at the University of Toronto when the Centre for the Study of Religion opened up. How would the study of religion be distinguished from the theology being taught in the theological colleges that are still constituents of the University of Toronto (and receive in Canada government support). During the



interview with david novak

97

debate, one of the founders of the Centre insisted that no one who is an adherent of a religious tradition could teach his or her tradition because they couldn’t be objective about it. Fortunately, no one has listened to him. My response to him was that on the basis of this reasoning, no practicing lawyer should be teaching in the law school and that no practicing physician should be teaching in the medical school. In fact, law is a good example of this problem. Occasionally, I teach in the law school. If somebody were philosophizing about law in general, but is not committed to any extant system of positive law in particular, could you take that person seriously? I mean, clearly even if you have a natural law theory, you’re still committed to a system of positive law; you just say that the positive law has validity if it doesn’t contradict what could be seen as principles necessary for any law to have moral authority. But if one is not committed to anything that’s a real lived entity in this world, then as Thomas Nagle said, “it’s the view from nowhere.” This issue came out once, interestingly enough, when Michael Walzer published the first volume of Jewish Political Tradition, with which I was also involved by contributing to the second volume. I wrote a long review of this project in The New Republic where I referred specifically to an essay by a prominent contemporary Jewish philosopher, Hillary Putnam. Putnam had discussed Yehudah Halevi, the great medieval Jewish philos­ opher/theologian. My critique was that while I know where Halevi is coming from, namely, I understand his commitments, I have no clear idea where Putnam’s commitments are coming from. And it always reminded me of something my father, who was a business man, used to say: “Never lend money to a man who’s running to catch a train because he has no address.” I understand your view that to philosophize as a religious person one has to be anchored in a particular religious tradition. There are, however, two issues here that require further exploration. The first is how do you define, or characterize, Jewish philosophy? The second is what exactly did you get from Catholic theologians? Did you acquire a certain methodology, a set of questions, or a kind of preference or sensibility? I would like to know what exactly you received from your experience in a Catholic institution that you could not have gotten any other place? There are two ways of doing Jewish philosophy. One way of doing Jewish philosophy is a philosophical reflection on the basic texts of the Jewish tradition, and especially the primary text: the Bible, which is considered

98

interview with david novak

by the Jewish tradition to be divine revelation. I think this is perfectly valid. In this respect, there can be a philosophy of Judaism like there can be a philosophy of law. For example, the recently deceased Ronald Dworkin was a great philosopher of the law, yet he located his philosophizing about law in general in American law, the law of the country he was a citizen of. In other words, philosophy is always philosophy of something. There are those who argue that philosophy generates its own object, but I don’t think that’s the case. There is also a school of philosophy known as phenomenology, which takes the phenomena in and of themselves, and doesn’t try to reduce them to something else. Instead, it tries to understand their inner structure or essence, namely, that without which they would be something else altogether. There’s another kind of Jewish philosophy which I would call “philosophy out of Judaism,” in which a philosopher who basically takes insights from the Jewish tradition, not because it’s the Jewish tradition, but that’s where he or she is coming from. Martin Buber is an example of someone who does philosophy in this manner. You don’t really know whether or how he is committed to the Jewish tradition, but clearly he’s a Jew and clearly he philosophizes in light of the Jewish tradition. This involves the question of the relationship between the universal and the particular. Clearly there are philosophers of Judaism and philosophers out of Judaism. To be a philosopher out of Judaism, do you have to be a philosopher of Judaism? Obviously, not. Yet I would say that Franz Rosenzweig is the best modern example of a philosopher of Judaism who was able to bring insights from the Jewish tradition into general philosophical discourse (which we might call today “multicultural”), and that he was effective in this task precisely because you know where he is coming from, namely, where his location in the world is. Contrary to my colleague, Robert Gibbs, I think that Rosenzweig is basically a theologian; he is not just using Judaism as an example of something else, even though he philosophizes about God, the world, and the human not merely on the basis of Jewish sources. If one is a philosopher out of Judaism, the whole problem becomes, what are your pre-philosophical commitments? Indeed, philosophy can never function as one’s starting point, since a person always has pre-philosophical commitments about which one has an ability as well as a desire to philosophize. But I don’t think that our philosophy creates its own object. For the sake of overall consistency, I would say that the best philosopher out of Judaism is somebody who is a philosopher of Judaism. However, I am a member of a community of discourse that can be loosely called Jewish Philosophy. I don’t want to be backed into some



interview with david novak

99

kind of a dogmatic corner, where I make all sorts of preconditions for how we can and should function as Jewish philosophers who practice the same academic discipline. So I’m willing to “bracket” (as phenomenological philosophers would say) that particular question. As for me, I try to bring insights of the Jewish tradition that I think are rationally justifiable into general philosophical discourse and engage others who do likewise with the Jewish tradition and with other traditions. On the other hand, I continually go back to a philosophical analysis of the Jewish tradition itself. For example, after writing several books that deal with natural law theory, which was my attempt to bring the Jewish tradition into larger philosophical discussions, I went back and wrote a book on the election of Israel. These books illustrate how I handle both philosophy and Jewish theology. By contrast, those who are only philosophers out of Judaism can be challenged by the question, “Well, why do you philosophize out of Judaism?” And the only answer these philosophers could give is: “Well, I was born Jewish” or “Judaism happens to interest me.” The need to explain why we academics are engaged in a particular inquiry is especially pertinent to positivist-type academics. When they are asked, “Why are you interested in Chinese history?” They tend to answer: “Well, I find it interesting.” But they fail to address the question, “But how does this subject matter connect to the rest of your life?” In other words, it is doubtful that a philosophical perspective is sufficient in and of itself. Let me give you another example. I’m a project scholar for a project at Georgetown University Center for International Studies on Religious Freedom. It’s a big project. And the three project scholars are myself; Jean Bethke Elshtain of the University of Chicago, a Christian scholar; and a man named Abdul Al-Sayed, an Australian Muslim scholar. Our task is basically to get together a few times a year and review all kinds of programs. In one of these meetings a fascinating debate ensued between Professor Noah Feldman of Harvard Law School, an interesting man, who has done lots of significant writing, and Judge (now Professor) Michael W. McConnell, who is a very serious evangelical Protestant, on the question of religious liberty. Feldman’s position was that having a religious commitment is no different than having a philosophical opinion or a political opinion or whatever, whereas McConnell argued that religious liberty is much more a basic right in the U.S. Constitution and its history of interpretation. When I interrogated Noah Feldman, I said to him: “I have two colleagues at the University of Toronto who are seriously committed Kantians in their philosophical perspective. Although I now know them personally, I wasn’t present at either of their weddings. But I would

100

interview with david novak

bet anything that at the time of the wedding, whoever officiated at their respective weddings was not reading from The Critique of Pure Reason.” In other words, a wedding means real life, real ritual, and real community, which are all pre-philosophical commitments. Indeed. So the question is how do these Kantian philosophers (who also happen to be Jewish) connect their Kantianism to their Judaism? I don’t want to press that point too hard because I don’t want to remove people from the discussion about Jewish philosophy. For such a discussion to occur there need to be as few preconditions as possible. It seems that you are using the term “Jewish philosophy” to denote three different things: philosophizing out of Judaism, philosophy of Judaism, and philosophy as an academic discipline. Yes. Let’s focus on Jewish philosophy as an academic discipline. How do you assess this field at the beginning of the twenty-first century? Let me answer the question by talking about the late Alexander Altmann, one of the great students of Jewish philosophy, but whom I was never privileged to have known, although I once wrote him a letter which he answered most graciously. In the 1980s, I was asked by my friend, Professor Alfred Ivry, who was a student of Altmann, to read the English translation of Altmann’s early essays along with the German originals which Ivry and Professor Paul Mendes-Flohr had intended to publish in English. Reading these early Altmann’s essays, I was surprised to learn how this great scholar of Jewish philosophy and mysticism was originally planning a much more constructive philosophical career for himself. In fact, he didn’t even write his dissertation on a Jewish topic, but rather on the non-Jewish philosopher Max Scheler (though he did have some Jewish family background). The publisher accepted the translated essays (and they did come out in print), and later there was a conference in London in the early 1990s in his memory, which was actually sponsored by Altmann’s brother, a very wealthy solicitor in London who paid for the whole thing out of his pocket. My paper for that conference was “Alexander Altmann: The Theologian Who Might Have Been.” I tried to reflect on why Altmann took the route



interview with david novak

101

he did, giving up on constructive philosophy. There are two explanations: One explanation is that he decided he just didn’t have it in him because he wasn’t really an original thinker. So it is better to do something well, rather than something badly. However, my friend, the German Protestant theologian Wolfhart Pannenberg, told me how he came to know Altmann in his last years and that Pannenberg had persuaded Altmann, who for many years had refused to return to his native Germany, to teach a summer seminar in Munich. Altmann’s choice of a topic was “Wittgenstein,” which indicates to me that he was returning to his more constructive philosophical interests. Also, Pannenberg said something quite moving (to me anyway) about Altmann: “He reminded me of the type of Jewish thinker we once had to converse with in this country.” Indeed, you could say that Alexander Altmann was the last great Jewish thinker who was born and educated in Germany. Another explanation for his professional trajectory is that Altmann, who functioned as a rabbi first in Germany and later in England, was very anxious to get into the academic world, and the only way to do it was the historical route. Given the historical experience of Jews in Germany since the 1820s the reality was that Jewish theology could not be taught within German universities. Jews could only write on philosophical topics historically. I think that’s why for a long time Jews had an aversion to the word “theology,” because they, qua Jews, couldn’t be in a theologische Facultät. There simply couldn’t be a Jewish theological faculty at a German university. French Jews usually never had that problem because theologique meant something different in France. The point of this story is that today (unlike Altmann’s day) Jewish philosophers can come out of the closet, so to speak, and I consider this development something encouraging. There are people who are doing Jewish philosophy today constructively and not just historically. I have in mind Elliot Wolfson, who really is a philosopher even though he writes primarily on Jewish mysticism, and others such as Ken Seeskin, Lenn E. Goodman, Alan Mittleman, and others. All of them are clearly doing Jewish philosophy, and not merely engaging in textual or historical analyses of Jewish philosophical texts. There are also hopeful signs among graduate students. Here at the University of Toronto we get graduate students who come with very intensive Jewish backgrounds, especially yeshiva backgrounds, and who are frustrated by their yeshiva experience because philosophical questions were not dealt with there; such questions were suppressed there. In past generations, people like that would have reached the conclusion that there

102

interview with david novak

was nothing in Judaism that was philosophical and therefore that there is no reason to remain committed to Judaism, so they went on their merry way. By contrast, today there are people who reach a different conclusion telling themselves that maybe they don’t have to give up Judaism in order to be a philosopher. The fact that some committed Jews today actually do become philosophers, and want to integrate their Judaism and their philosophy, is encouraging. What is the proper context for Jewish philosophy as an academic discipline? Should it be done within Jewish Studies or with the Humanities more generally? The best model for Jewish philosophy as an academic discipline is the model we have here at the University of Toronto. Sixteen years ago I came here to direct the Jewish Studies program. The program had already existed, but it needed to become more vital. When I was interviewed for the position, I told the committee that that I was going to put Jewish philosophy on the front burner. Today we have an undergraduate major and a minor in Jewish Studies. We have a thriving master’s program, and we also serve many welleducated people in the community who take courses in Jewish Studies. Interestingly, when we discussed the possibility of a PhD program in Jewish Studies, most of us were opposed to it. Why? Because, truth be told, PhD programs in Jewish Studies sometimes attract people who perhaps couldn’t make it in other fields. To do a PhD in Jewish Philosophy one has to be trained as a philosopher and be admitted either to the Philosophy Department or to the Centre for the Study of Religion, because we do a lot of philosophy here as well. If you want to do a PhD in Jewish history, we want you to be good enough for the History Department. When a Jewish Studies program becomes a PhD program unto itself, it often becomes very ghettoized, cut off from the intellectual life of the university so that no one pays any attention to it. Within the academic field of Jewish Studies, would you say that Jewish philosophy is thriving? Some people think that Jewish philosophy today is not doing anything particularly interesting or that it is largely irrelevant for Jewish life. What’s your assessment of Jewish philosophy as an academic discourse within the context of Jewish culture?



interview with david novak

103

Jewish philosophy as an academic discipline has come a long way since I joined the Association of Jewish Studies. At that time (in the 1970s) you couldn’t do anything that wasn’t totally descriptive, so most of the sessions were on medieval Jewish philosophy. But the fact that we now have people doing Jewish philosophy as a constructive discipline, and that they engage contemporary issues, indicates that Jewish philosophy has changed greatly. Jewish philosophy is now a living practice and not just as study of past authors, even though the discipline of Jewish Studies is still largely controlled by historians. And why is that a problem? It’s a problem because most historians are anti-philosophical whether they know it or not. For example, when I was elected a member of the American Academy of Jewish Research, I was the only person there who was doing constructive Jewish philosophy. Today there may be one or two others, but on the whole this organization is still dominated by historians. I also consider it a problem that many studies in Jewish philosophy still adhere to the same old historicism. Even when they engage a modern Jewish philosopher, such as Franz Rosenzweig, too many historians of Jewish philosophy are concerned with who influenced him (which is certainly an interesting question) rather than explicating his philosophical views to determine if they have any value for present discourse. Several years ago at the Association for Jewish Studies we had a session about the relationship between philosophy and history. On this panel (which included the historian David N. Myers), I said as follows: “Look, I clearly need Jewish history and Jewish textual scholarship, because if I am philosophizing on Judaism, I have to have something to work on. So, the Jewish philosopher clearly needs what the historian does. Nevertheless, it is rather patronizing if I say to you, basically, I need you to write my footnotes. But how do you, the historian, need me the philosopher?” And how did David Myers respond to this challenge? He gave me a rather vague answer. I mean, he was open to philosophy and he was not hostile to Jewish philosophy as a type of inquiry. However, the problem with the scientific study of Judaism promoted by historians is that scholars of Judaism can tell you many things that are true about Judaism, but they can’t tell you anything that Judaism says is true.

104

interview with david novak

Yet, in the postmodern world, the notion of truth has been profoundly problematized. How can we determine the truth value of Jewish beliefs in a postmodern world that is inherently skeptical and suspicious about all truth claims? Okay, this brings me back to my encounter with Catholic theologians. Do you want to know what I got from the Catholics, or what the Catholic theologians and philosophers reinforced for me? They reinforced my belief that truth is a transcendental. The truth is something that clearly exists, and that the mind has to become adequate to it. Truth is not something humans invent; it is created by God. Now that’s a faith assumption. But note that a scientist who approaches the universe and assumes that there’s intelligibility out there, such an approach is also based on a faith assumption. So that the thing that I have most in common with the Catholic philosophers and theologians I have worked with is that they were convinced that faith and reason nourished one another. And, in fact, the late Pope John Paul II wrote, when he was most philosophical, his great encyclical, Fides et Ratio (Faith and Reason). I don’t agree with all of his conclusions, but I like the way he approached the whole question. That’s your indebtedness. Yeah, yeah, that is my indebtedness to them. Even though Germain Grisez, my teacher, calls himself a “Thomist,” many Thomists suspect he has distorted Aquinas in a number of significant ways. So I agree with him that there is such a thing as natural law, though my view of natural law is quite different from his. Yet our differences are not theological, that is, it is not a Jewish-Catholic dispute. In fact, there are some Catholic natural law thinkers who tell me they have more in common with my take on natural law than they do with their fellow Catholic Germain Grisez. Also, I suspect I got the best out of him philosophically because I wasn’t a Catholic and he couldn’t try to make me into his disciple like his Catholic students. It makes sense, yes. But, on the other hand, Professor Grisez (I cannot call any teacher of mine, whether Jewish or non-Jewish, by his or her last name or first name) encouraged me to do constructive philosophy and to carefully think out my positions. For example, I remember when writing my dissertation for



interview with david novak

105

him, when he criticized something of mine, I would say, “Okay, I’ll take it out.” But in response he would say: “Don’t take it out if you think it’s true, just make a better argument for it.” That’s a good mentor. That’s a good mentor as well as an example of how a Christian theologian and moral theorist can shape the thinking of a Jewish theologian. But within the Jewish philosophical tradition, how do you understand the relationship between medieval philosophy and modern Jewish philosophy? Do you see direct continuity from one to the other? Do you see tensions between them? After all, you are at home in both medieval and modern Jewish philosophy. All right, in my epistemology I am a Kantian, although I am not a Kantian in my ethical theory and not in my ontology. Therefore, I think that most of the metaphysical speculation of medieval Jewish philosophers/ theologians was undone by Galileo and Newton, let alone by Darwin and Einstein. In other words, medieval Jewish philosophers were basically working within an Aristotelian model of a teleological universe and today we can’t talk about the universe that way anymore. The metaphysics of medieval Jewish philosophers was built on the back of physics, of natural science, and both were thoroughly Aristotelian. Now, Kant shifts the emphasis from theoretical to practical reason, and this is one of the main reasons why Kant appealed to Jews. He talked about law, he talked about commandments. And I think that the primary datum for Jewish philosophy is the halakha. In this regard I could be viewed as a post-Kantian. The relationship between theoretical and practical reasoning is also central to the medieval Aristotelian tradition. For example, scholars of Maimonides debate how to understand the fact that he called the Mishneh Torah “our great compendium.” Does “great” refer to the fact that there are more pages in this composition or does it mean something qualitative? In an essay called “Can We Be Maimonideans Today?” published in a volume edited by Lenn Goodman, I argued that the Mishneh Torah is a more interesting philosophical work than the Guide for the Perplexed. Why? Because so much of the Guide talks about natural science and metaphysics that are no longer true. Nobody today looks at the world that way. Among contemporary Jewish philosophers, the one who has attempted to come back to that world in a very specific way is Lenn Goodman, who is a personal friend as well as a philosopher for whom I have great respect. I have reflected about his approach in an essay on creation that I wrote for

106

interview with david novak

the Cambridge volume on modern Jewish philosophy. I compared Goodman’s understanding of creation to the views of Franz Rosenzweig and Hermann Cohen. And while I agree with Rosenzweig, basically, I think Goodman has presented the best kind of cosmological argument that anybody has done in modern times. In other words, as a Jewish philosopher I see continuity between the medieval and the modern chapters of Jewish philosophical activity even though the medieval worldview is no longer true. Correct. I share your view. Nonetheless, there is still a difference between medieval and modern Jewish philosophy. If practical reason is more important than theoretical reason, and if theoretical reason for Jews no longer becomes speculating metaphysically, based on natural science, but really something like Kabbalah, rooted in the inner-reality of Judaism, then we need to ask what are the ontological kind of presuppositions? This is why, once again, I find the Mishneh Torah to be more interesting philosophically because it is talking about something that’s still with us in the world, namely Jewish law. People still observe it even though Maimonides was writing about laws that pertain to the destroyed Temple in Jerusalem because he thought the Temple would be rebuilt. In other words, the Mishneh Torah captures the reality and the hopes of the Jewish people. I fully understand your Kantian focus on practical reasoning, but you also wrote a book on natural law theory in Judaism that explicates and even defends the metaphysical assumptions of the medieval Jewish philosophers. Yes, that is true, but I only defend some of their metaphysical assumptions. So why bother with these ideas at all if you consider them either untrue or intellectually defunct? Well, I bother with them because I’m dealing with medieval Jewish philosophy as they’re dealing with taamei ha-mitzvot (the reasons of the commandments). This discourse engages in practical reasoning and I argue that Jewish philosophers today can do their own kind of practical reason, but we don’t have to do it based upon medieval ontological assumptions.



interview with david novak

107

Fair enough. This is actually an example of how the historian of medieval Jewish philosophy can be very useful to the constructive Jewish philosopher or the philosophical theologian. Oh, I don’t dispute that. This is also an example of how the history of science is also of relevance to the work of the Jewish philosopher. How you interpret what a medieval texts says depends on your knowledge of the history of medieval science, which is inseparable from metaphysics. That means that medieval philosophy is relevant not only to the extent that it does practical reasoning. The theoretical assumptions of the medieval Jewish philosophers were inseparable from their practical reasoning with the result that you cannot accept the latter and forget about the former. Oh, I didn’t say forget about it. I’m not saying forget about it. But I’m saying that we have—we can be—we have to be much more selective. All I’m saying is that we can retrieve more of their practical reasoning than we can retrieve their theoretical reasoning. Nobody appropriates the whole tradition. Everybody is selective in their reading of the tradition, even though no one should rule out any part of the tradition that now seems irrelevant (like nineteenth-century Jewish scholars largely ruled out Kabbalah). In this selective process there are certain texts you get more out of than others. The times one lives in, and the questions that arise in them de novo, largely motivate us to look to those parts of the tradition that seem best-suited to provide us answers to these questions, or at least relevant approaches to these questions. Fair enough. So if you pick and choose from the past, what is your relationship to modern Jewish philosophy? Kantian philosophy was a point of departure for modern Jewish philosophy, but not only has modern philosophy gone well beyond Kant, we are now in a postmodern era that has challenged much of Kantian philosophy. So how important is modern philosophy to you? What kind of a modern Jewish philosopher are you? Modern philosophy is very important to me. Besides Kant, I take most seriously the philosophy of Edmund Husserl, Max Scheler, and Ludwig Wittgenstein. I must admit I have somewhat of an aversion to the whole Hegelian tradition. I am certainly interested in phenomenology, which is

108

interview with david novak

an interest I got from Professor Heschel. His phenomenological study of prophecy is a very important influence on me. In fact, I regularly teach a course on phenomenology here at the University of Toronto. As for the so called postmoderns, Emmanuel Levinas is the one I like the most. I have a lot of differences with Levinas, but at least I like the way he does philosophy. However, I have little or no interest in Jacques Derrida and other poststructuralist thinkers. In fact, I think that Derrida’s essay on Hermann Cohen (which could be said to be his most Jewish work) is disgraceful because he said that Cohen was nothing but an apologist for German nationalism. During the First World War everybody was writing propaganda (on both sides of the German-British divide), and Cohen wrote in the same vein when he spoke about the marriage (or cultural symbiosis) of the Germans and the Jews. I agree that this was not Hermann Cohen at his very best, maybe it was even his worst, but there is a lot more to Hermann Cohen than German nationalism. Although I read Hermann Cohen critically, there’s a lot more that I can find in Hermann Cohen than I can find in Gersonides, for example. Even though, I now have a graduate student who is completing his dissertation on Gersonides and current virtue theory in ethics. Within the contemporary discourse, what does postmodernism mean to you, if it means anything at all? Do you consider postmodernism to be a challenge to Judaism? Is it a way to rethink Judaism in a constructive and novel way that we couldn’t do as modernist Jews? To be perfectly honest with you, if I understood it, I would pick an answer to your question. It just leaves me cold. I mean, if somebody raises a philosophical question out of that discourse, then let’s deal with the question. But I don’t find most of it, or virtually all of it, to be philosophically relevant or important. Postmodernism offers a critical posture that challenges all grand narratives (including religious narratives). Isn’t that posture inherently philosophical? Yes, but a criticism that’s not based upon something ultimately positive becomes almost nihilism. I have in mind a comment that Michael Polanyi, a philosopher/scientist, said about analytic philosophers: “They’re sharpening their knives sharper and sharper to cut less and less.” I think the same comment can be directed toward postmodern thinkers.



interview with david novak

109

Your comment actually raises an interesting question. Is there no difference between Anglo-American analytic tradition and French-German continental philosophy? If there is a difference, how do you understand it and how relevant are these two traditions for contemporary Jewish philosophy? Well, the one philosopher who launched continental philosophy and subsequent postmodern philosophical reflections was Martin Heidegger. I have quite an interest in Heidegger’s philosophy, although he was vile person. Indeed, I always think that when dealing with Heidegger, even only in his writings, we have to kind of “hold our nose.” But he was an extraordinary philosopher and the entire method of deconstruction is indebted to him. So, I guess I am somewhat more partial to the continental tradition than my critique of postmodernism suggests. But on the other hand, I have a great liking and affinity for Wittgenstein who is central to the Anglo-American analytic tradition. Wittgenstein’s notion of natural languages is very relevant to Judaism. One can look upon Judaism as a natural language. Wittgenstein’s argument against Russell and some of the early logical positivists was that language is not a transcendental ideal but that language is basically something that grows up naturally. It is a life form. Wittgenstein further explained that languages—say, the language of philosophy—are really built on the back of language as a life form. In that sense philosophy is always a secondary language. This is the great debate between Karl Popper and Wittgenstein. I have also been interested in Popper so, as a modern philosopher, I like to think that I’m interested in both. But I resonated with the more analytic side of the continentals and the more metaphysical side, if you will, of Anglo-American analytic philosophy. Do you integrate the two philosophical traditions when you engage in Jewish philosophy? Yes. Do you apply their distinctive methodologies to your interpretation of texts? Yes. Analytic philosophy is most helpful to all philosophical questions I address. As an intellectual tool, analytic philosophy is even relevant to my Talmudic scholarship. I study Talmud on a daily basis and I have a

110

interview with david novak

wonderful Talmud class that has been meeting regularly for the past fifteen years on Tuesday nights here in Toronto (without any connection to the University of Toronto). It’s totally Torah for its own sake. One time we discussed the very interesting question of Talmudic biblical interpretation. When the rabbis are deriving something from a verse in the Bible, are they really deriving it from the Bible or is it only a proof text or what we traditionally call an asmakhta? Did the rabbis derive an idea from the biblical text or did they latch onto it something that they thought? This concerns philosophy of language, and the analytic philosophers have been in the forefront of what has been called the “linguistic turn.” My Talmud students tell me that my approach is quite different from the approach to the Talmud they received in their rather traditional schools. My main point to them is, what is the conceptual difference here? What were the conceptual points that the rabbis were arguing about? And what’s the practical outcome of their differences? In this regard there is an interesting similarity between Talmudic discourse and the analytic philosophical discourse: both attempt to be rigorously logical. I think there’s also a dialectic between the theoretical and the practical. Your comment offers us a nice segue, actually, to the next part of the interview that relates to your specific work. You have written extensively in three main areas: social theory and political theory, JewishChristian dialogue, and ethics, especially medical ethics and bioethics. How do you see the integration of these three areas of concern? Are they really integrated in some inherent way or do you simply reflect philosophically on a variety of problems that concerns Jews and nonJews today? No, no. My work as a whole is much more structured than mere reflections on various controversial issues. Let me illustrate that to you by looking at my reflection on Jewish-Christian relations. I am currently involved in a project with the Catholic theologian Matthew Levering, who teaches now at the University of Dayton. He is a young man, early forties I would say, who wrote a book called Biblical Natural Law, in which he seemed to be very influenced by my own writing on natural law. He subsequently wrote an entire monograph on my thought. Here is an example of a connection between my work in natural law theory and my interest in JewishChristian relations. At the same time, I have become a good friend of a Muslim scholar, Anver Emon, who teaches Islamic Law in our Faculty of



interview with david novak

111

Law. He is a brilliant scholar who was born in Los Angeles to Indian parents and he holds a PhD in history from UCLA and a doctorate in law from Yale. He wrote a book called Islamic Natural Law Theory, where he claims he was influenced by my work. And the three of us—a Jew, a Christian, and a Muslim—are now writing a book together on natural law in our respective traditions and how this can be of significant interest to scholars of secular law in our increasingly multicultural world. This project should give you an idea about how I integrate my various social, political, and intellectual concerns. Each of us has written a major essay not just rehashing our previous work, but also carrying it forward. Each of us is writing a detailed critical commentary of the other two papers, illustrating how to conduct interreligious, multicultural, and philosophical conversation. The goal of the book is to reflect on how people committed to religious traditions, all of which have developed ethics and law, deal with the fact that their traditions say that there are certain norms that apply to all human beings and that these norms are binding. But isn’t this a kind of imperialism? Instead, though, these norms are binding because they seem to be the codification of the justifiable claims humans make on each other, not because of the authority of any particular tradition. The challenge of the book is to reflect on the conundrum: If there is a universal ethics, why do we need religious traditions? In short, how do religious traditions deal with a universal ethic that they can endorse without being replaced by it? That is a good and valuable question. What have you learned from the particular manner your project approaches the question? In terms of Jewish-Christian dialogue, I found myself in a pretty good situation based on earlier models for Jewish-Christian relations. As I already noted, I was a student of Abraham Joshua Heschel in the early 1960s when he went to Rome and negotiated with the Pope. He received incredible abuse from all sorts of people including the leader of the Orthodox community, Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik, who wrote this famous essay against Professor Heschel (though never mentioning his name) called “Confrontation” (which I critique in my 1989 book, Jewish-Christian Dialogue). Professor Heschel’s interaction with the Catholic Church was unique precisely because he was the first heavyweight Jewish theologian who encountered Catholic theologians at the highest level. Previously, it was customary to send diplomats to conduct such dialogue. With Professor Heschel, the

112

interview with david novak

dialogue became very theological as well as philosophical, since he subscribed to dialogical philosophy of the interhuman as the arena for divine revelation. The intellectual challenge for interreligious dialogue is that most of the things that are involved in the God-human relationship are very specific to different traditions. Nonetheless, our respective traditions sound similar because, when it comes to moral issues or political issues, these traditions all face the same problems. You see, these problems are not unique even though they manifest themselves in specific forms in each religious tradition. Thus, for Christians, or more specifically, for Catholics, whether Jesus is in the bread and the wine is a particular question that pertains to the mystery of Christianity. For Jews, how did God give the Torah at Mount Sinai is our particular question given our own understanding of revelation. But despite their religious particularity, their traditions wrestle with the same broader human questions. Therefore it’s very important for the Jewish philosopher or theologian to be talking to people in other traditions who have the same problem. As I understand your involvement in Jewish-Christian dialogue, you are doing much more than identifying what Jews and Christians have in common, since you have written extensively about the role of the Gentile within the Jewish tradition. That’s correct, because I have to explain how the Jewish tradition views non-Jews. Why should Jews concern themselves with non-Jews? First of all, because we live with them—although it is true that our dealings with Christians over the centuries have been very, very confrontational. Second, we need to remember that the world did not begin at Mount Sinai. According to Jewish tradition, we were living under a law that was considered a universal law. So we need to reflect about our relationship to the non-Jew, to the Gentile, who also lives under that universal law. So what is the relationship between the Gentile, who is what I used to call co-Judaic man, who is also a pre-Judaic man. Today that question has a totally new meaning because we live in democratic societies, where the warrant for that society is not taken from any of our traditions, but we face some of the same moral problems. Additionally, we also face a decided secularist mode of thinking that says basically that we don’t have to accommodate people of religious traditions because they have nothing to say. It’s all particularism with no universal validity. The secularist approach to religion reduces all of it to revelation, thereby oversimplifying the complexity of religious traditions and mistakenly leading us to believe that if we can



interview with david novak

113

only get rid of religion we would really have universal ethics and universal solidarity. So today, believers of diverse religious traditions have a common enemy. Do you mean secularism and atheism? Yes, especially the militant variants thereof. Militant secularism is now the modus vivendi of high culture, of the academy, of the media, and of the courts. I can illustrate the point with a personal story. When I was here at the University of Toronto about a year, maybe a year and a half, I was at a faculty meeting, and somebody just turned to me and said, “You’re so theological. How did they ever hire you here?” So I said, “Me, theological? Theology, that’s something Christians do. I do universal ethics. I don’t know what you’re talking about.” (Whether that person caught the irony in this answer of mine, I do not know.) Militant secularism poses a very important challenge to Jews and this is where I think philosophy is really important, and Jewish philosophy is especially important. Today those who philosophize about Judaism bring it into the public square that can be divided between the liberals and traditionalists. The liberals have a tendency to say that anything that liberal-left culture endorses, Judaism is for it. I regard this as a kind of “me, too-ism.” By contrast, the traditionalists present the Jewish point of view as a response to or critique of the dominant ethos or social consensus. Jewish philosophers have to address two main questions. First, what is “the Jewish point of view” or “a Jewish point of view.” Second, why should anybody listen to what you say Jewish law says we should do? Truth be told, most of the Jews today don’t concern themselves with what Jewish law has to say, so we have an interesting question in terms of interreligious dialogue. Is it possible for the interlocutor in an interreligious dialogue to say, “I’m the correct reader of this self-standing tradition and I’ll tell you what it tells me?” Yes, but even if you do that, why should anybody out there accept your authority? If they want to accept the authority of the Jewish tradition, let them convert to Judaism. Why should anybody say this is what the Jewish traditions says I should do? So you want us to do what the Jews say? Do you want to live under the authority of the Jews? Then come live in our community.

114

interview with david novak

No, that person could say to you, “I don’t care really about what nonJews think, I’m only speaking to other Jews,” and then tell them what the halakhic tradition or what the tradition says. Bioethics is the perfect example of the situation under consideration. Before bioethics became prevalent in the public sphere, there were Orthodox Jews who never talked to non-Jews other than in terms of conducting commerce or business with them. Most of these Jews didn’t even talk to other Jews or found that talking to non-Jews was easier than talking to Jews. All of a sudden bioethics comes along and with it the perception that the moral consensus of Western societies has broken down. So now these Orthodox Jews who have never participated in interfaith dialogue are on academic panels, on university forums, and even on television supremely stroking their beards (literally or figuratively) as they articulate the position of Jewish law on this or that question. In the public discourse on bioethics, these people present Judaism as if it were a monolithic tradition in which nobody disputes anything. At that point, somebody like me, with knowledge of the history of Jewish legal discourse, has to raise his hand and say “just a moment,” and prick the balloon, as it were. The point is to understand the difference between answering halakhic questions whether something is kosher or not and reflecting on the message of the Jewish tradition in interreligious dialogue. I think that the recent involvement of Orthodox halakhists in bioethics debates is simply the result of them enjoying the attention they get, as if to say, “Finally, people are interested in what I am saying.” In the public discourse on bioethical issues, Jewish philosophy has an important role to play. Jewish philosophy has to say that the reason that Judaism has said that certain norms apply to all human beings is because they are rational, because they can be argued for on universal grounds. Therefore, I’m not saying you should do this because the Jewish tradition says you should do it. I’m saying that the Jewish tradition has an interesting take on something which you should have known already. But if not, you can learn it from the Jewish tradition. Let’s take the issue of abortion for example. What is the Jewish position on abortion and is it more lenient, let’s say, than the Catholic position? Not that much. The difference between the Catholic position and the Jewish position revolves around the question of whether you save the life of



interview with david novak

115

the mother or save the life of the fetus. I never minimize that difference. However, there are so few abortions today that are actually done that way because any woman who can get herself to an abortionist can get prenatal care. So it is extremely rare that the well-being of the mother is at stake; it does happen, but it’s extremely rare. Those who present the presumed lenient Jewish view on abortion do so by generalizing from individual cases. But they are unable to talk about abortion as a matter of public policy. And even in individual cases, the issues of abortion rarely generated legal attention. If a rabbi got a question about abortion once, that was unusual. So in terms of abortion I’m not saying that my position is the only Jewish position. I try to lay out the parameters within the Jewish normative tradition. If someone says that all abortions are prescribed in Judaism that person is already out of the loop in terms of the Jewish normative tradition. Similarly, if someone says that abortion is a right that doesn’t have to be justified, then that person, too, is speaking outside the bounds of the tradition. I am aware that there are more lenient and less lenient views on abortion, but I think that the stricter view is rationally more compelling than the more lenient view. So philosophy can articulate the meaning of the particularistic Jewish laws? Yes. Can the Jewish particularistic tradition be universalized, thereby addressing or becoming relevant to all human beings? Well, my reading of the Jewish tradition can certainly be made relevant to all humans. But my reading of it is not off the wall. Let me illustrate the point by another example from the debate on abortion. About twenty years ago, the American Jewish Committee commissioned several Jewish scholars to write papers on major social issues from the perspective of the Jewish tradition. My paper was on capital punishment and it was not particularly controversial. By contrast, the paper of Rabbi David Feldman, who had written a famous book on abortion, became extremely controversial because he was very, very lenient. But even Rabbi Feldman would say that abortion is not a right, it has to be justified. In this regard he remained a traditional halakhic Jew. When we discussed the paper in the committee, one woman who was a professor of social work became virtually berserk. She was fuming against Feldman, saying “This is terrible! This

116

interview with david novak

is horrible! This reflects none of the thinking of me or any of my Jewish female friends!” In response to her rage, I said to her “Look, I tell you what, let’s have two papers on abortion: one by Rabbi Feldman and one by you, thereby illustrating that the Jewish tradition is not monolithic. But you will have to make your case through arguments and explain what is Jewish about your view on abortion besides the fact that you are a Jew.” And what happened? As far as I know, the paper was never written. In this case it seems that the challenger of David Feldman was not as versed in the Jewish tradition as he was. But how do you adjudicate the different readings of the tradition by interpreters who are exceedingly well versed in the halakhic sources and who have similar philosophical training? Yet we can still end up with very different and even contradictory positions on any given Jewish topic. If so, is it really correct to say that Judaism has a good, rational message to everybody else? Well, without mentioning names of individual scholars, you can have two scholars who are equally trained in philosophy and in the Jewish legal tradition, and they would reach different conclusions. I agree with another prominent Jewish bioethicist on abortion and euthanasia, but we disagree on stem-cell research and on sexuality. In these major debates philosophical argumentation is most helpful and important. The Jewish community would benefit from having open public debate in which two Jewish philosophers would explain what they have in common and where they disagree. So, the role of philosophy is primarily to clarify the stand one takes? Yes, its role is to clarify and help explicate various positions within the rabbinic tradition and, most importantly, to justify them rationally. In normative Jewish ethics, where Rabbi A can cite x number of texts, Rabbi B can cite a number of other texts, and in good Talmudic fashion, Rabbi B can show why Rabbi A’s texts don’t really say what he thinks they’re saying and vice versa. The dispute is really won when one seems to make a more rationally compelling argument in the sense of public reasoning as John Rawls and Jürgen Habermas have understood it.



interview with david novak

117

Why would Habermas’s view of communicative rationality be relevant to a person who is to the right of you on the Jewish religious spectrum? Why should a traditional Jew of that ilk accept a certain conception of rationality that is rooted in the Kantian tradition? No, what I’m trying to say is that the Jewish legal discourse is inherently rational and that philosophy, in fact, informs Jewish legal discourse. For example, certain medieval Jewish jurists (posekim) were trained philosophically and one can show, as I once did, that their philosophical opinions influenced their legal decision making, namely, the way they were coming down on the side of A rather than on side of B. Okay. Today we have to make our philosophical assumptions more explicit and show why one argument is more rational that another argument. Within the Jewish community, if somebody says “this is the halakha,” and somebody else says “no, that is the halakha” then you’re going to have to present an argument that seems to be more rationally compelling whether the discussion is directed to Jews or non-Jews. That’s what the discourse of taamei ha-mitzvot is all about. The inherent of the commandment dictates or requires this mode of argumentation. In other words, halakha in terms of actual practical judgment involves making a judgment in the Kantian sense. Not just analysis. The analysis has to come first. But somebody has to make a judgment—somebody has to say to a certain point, as Hermann Cohen would say, not only is this what the Jewish tradition has said in x number of texts, but it’s what it ought to say under the present circumstances. Because Judaism is a normative tradition, it does not only describe reality, it prescribes it. Are you saying that Jewish law is inherently philosophical? Oh, yes. The data of Jewish law is not inherently philosophical, it wasn’t created by philosophers, but the structure of Jewish law (as Maimonides already understood) is inherently rational. Once you try to give an overall structure to Jewish law, you become a philosopher of the law.

118

interview with david novak

In light of these statements, where does Kabbalah fit into your understanding of Jewish law? Yes, the relation of Kabbalah and halakha is fascinating, and I have learned a lot about it from the great book by Jacob Katz, Halakha and Kabbalah. However, I have a certain problem with Kabbalah. My problem with Kabbalah is, and forgive me for any irreverence, that I just don’t like that style of thinking. Is it too messy for you? Yes, it’s too esoteric. However, I look upon Kabbalah as midrash, which means that I try as much as possible to refer to kabbalistic texts. If I can possibly use a kabbalistic text, I do so to show (if nothing else) that I haven’t ignored Kabbalah. But then Kabbalah becomes just an illustration for a view or a position that did not necessarily originate with the kabbalistic tradition. That is correct. I don’t consider myself to be in that line of thinking, but I can’t ignore Kabbalah because Kabbalah was the major voice of Jewish theology from the thirteenth century until, at least, the eighteenth century, and perhaps even to the present. It is simply impossible to ignore Kabbalah within the contours of Jewish history. Here is a cute analogy about the place of Kabbalah with the Jewish tradition. I have a brother-in-law, who is much older than I am, who’s a lawyer and who used to do a lot of probate work, that is, wills. And people would come in and they’d say, “I hate my children. I don’t want to leave them everything. They’ve disgraced me and so on.” And he would say, “You have to leave them something. Why? Because if you don’t leave them something, they’ll contest the will and they’ll say that you’re so insane that you didn’t even know that you had children.” So I would say mutatis mutandis, if I don’t quote the Kabbalah, someone could ask, “Where has he been? There were over six centuries in which Kabbalah dominated Jewish life!” In order to avoid this kind of a challenge or the perception that I am ignorant of Kabbalah, I do quote it even though I am not sympathetic to this mode of thinking. I recognize the philosophical depth of Kabbalah and I have been trying actually to goad Elliot Wolfson, whom I consider to be the most philosophically interesting of today’s Kabbalah scholars, into explicating Kabbalah philosophically, that is, doing so when speaking in the first person, because a philosopher has to speak



interview with david novak

119

in the first person. A philosopher has to say, “This is what I think is true.” Wolfson’s explication of Kabbalah is philosophical, but it has to be stated more clearly in his own voice rather than in the voice or voices of his sources. He and I (and some others) are working towards a conference where all of us have to do just that. How to explicate a kabbalistic text goes to the heart of the problem of textual interpretation. Can one really understand a kabbalistic text if it stands in conflict with one’s philosophical assumptions? If one tries to turn a kabbalistic text into a philosophical or rational text, then one may radically alter the original meaning of that text. To some extent it might be necessary to speak in the voice of the kabbalistic or Hasidic text in order to understand it from within, so to speak. Yes. What is at stake here is a certain understanding of textuality and of the appropriate theory of interpretation. Well, I’d be interested to have a public discussion about the relationship of Kabbalah to philosophy in order to sharpen these theoretical issues. It would be similar to the discussion about the relationship between philosophy and history. Within the field of Jewish Studies, scholars of Kabbalah and those of philosophy are always at odds. In fact, they represent two different points of view. It would be fruitful to think about how each one handles the view of the other one. Historically, philosophy and Kabbalah have cross-fertilized one other. Perhaps we need a contemporary reflection about their relationship. At any rate, one cannot ignore Kabbalah when one reflects philosophically about Judaism. In the Middle Ages, kabbalists actually constructed philosophical arguments and adopted the intellectual postures of the philosophers. Moreover to the kabbalists, the rationalist philosophers appeared as too naïve or even unsophisticated. Well, I think Kabbalah has richer explanations of the mitzvot. Ultimately, what was at stake between the philosophers and the kabbalists was the rationale for the commandments. As Gershom Scholem already noted,

120

interview with david novak

Kabbalah got more attention among Jews, especially after the publication of the Zohar, because it provided a much richer rationale for the mitzvot. The point becomes clearer if one compares the kabbalistic to the philosophical exposition of pilgrimage. With all due respect to Maimonides, his rationale for the pilgrimage holidays—namely, that these holidays are good for people because they create sociality—is rather flatfooted. I agree that the kabbalistic organic and even organismic understanding of the commandments is much more serious and compelling in part because Kabbalah responds to existential, social, and even political challenges. Yes. Let me turn now to explore your own social and political theory. What do you consider to be the most pressing social and political issues today? What is the major challenge today for Jews? Is it Israel, is it the Israeli-Arab conflict, is it assimilation, is it anti-Semitism? If you are going to list the five most pressing challenges for Jewish life today, what will they be? I’m working on a book on Zionism now and indeed I think the existence of Israel is the most important modern Jewish event, even more important than the Holocaust, with all due respect to the martyrs of the Holocaust. We may differ on that point. What kind of “importance” do you have in mind—political, philosophical, or cultural? I mean that the existence of the State of Israel changed reality for the Jewish people, even for the world. So, the importance of the State of Israel is existential. Yes, it is existential. That is a good way to describe it. Now, the reason I’m doing this philosophical reflection is there are a number of historical studies of Zionist thinking. But I think that most Jews, even Jews who are Zionists, only have emotional motivation for their Zionism rather than reasons, or their reasons are inadequate. And I think that it’s very similar to the attitudes toward the rationale for the commandments. I mean, if Zionism is an important, indispensable aspect of Judaism; if the building



interview with david novak

121

up, the settling, of the land of Israel is a mitzvah, a commandment, then I think it’s important that people understand the reasons of this commandment. Now, there’s a whole mind-set that says, don’t tell people reasons, it’ll only confuse them. Joseph Albo mentions this in his Sefer ha-Ikkarim, yet he opts against that view, saying, “Yes, but do we want our tradition to look stupid?” So, as a good rationalist he spells out the rationales for the commandments. It is important that people understand their passion for Israel and realize that there are reasons for it. Do you consider this philosophical understanding? I call it philosophical because what happens today, and I have to situate this historically, is that there are arguments being made by Jews really against the validity of the State of Israel. And these are not people who claim that Israel is bad for Judaism or someone who is arguing against the State of Israel on the basis of international law. It is too easy to dismiss the current critics of the State of Israel as self-hating Jews. In so doing, we actually underestimate their opposition to the State of Israel. So, what do we usually get in the contemporary debate about the State of Israel? We get emotional responses and anger instead of a rational discourse. I think that people should have reasons for being Zionist even if there weren’t anti-Zionists. But the fact is, as Menachem Kellner shows in his brilliant book on dogma, that people start thinking of reasons when somebody is challenging them. It’s just the nature of human beings. So, I think that providing rational reasons for the existence of the State of Israel is a pressing issue. But in terms of my political theory, I think that the issue of rights is the most important modern political issue. I wrote a book called Covenantal Rights. And I think that one has to see—as I have tried to do also in the sequel to this book on the judicial social contract, The Jewish Social Contract—how rights theory fits within Judaism: what are the relevant terms for rights in Judaism, whether the discourse on rights is inherent to Judaism and whether the Jewish tradition presents a better take on rights than those who are usually committed to them, namely, political liberals. Basically, the posture of Jewish philosophy is similar to that of Philo, namely, the Jewish tradition speaks to philosophy with either arrogance or pride about what the tradition can do. It is as if the Jewish philosophers say, “As a Jew, I can do everything you philosophers do and better.” This posture emerges not because, as Jews, we’re trying to

122

interview with david novak

impress the non-Jewish philosophers, but because we don’t want to look stupid compared to them. And we believe the Torah contains all worldly wisdom—and much more (but not less). Do “rights” pertain just to the rights of Jews? No, I mean the rights of everyone. How about the rights of the Arab or the rights of the Palestinian today? Does your philosophical reflection on the non-Jew in Judaism take these particular cases into consideration? In my theory of rights, rights are justified claims made by one party upon another. There are three areas of rights: There are the rights of God as Creator; there are also the rights of individuals, of Jews and non-Jews; and there are rights of communities. Between these three classes of rights there is a dialectic. The reflection about the dialectical relationship between the rights of God, the individual, and the community is inherent in the Jewish tradition. In this claim, I argue against Leo Strauss, who said that rights theory is a modern invention that has nothing to do with classical political philosophy. By contrast, Isaiah Berlin showed quite the contrary, that the discourse on rights emerged out of the philosophical discussion on natural law theory, a point of view that is backed by the work of the medievalist Brian Tierney, who wrote a very good book on this point. So, Berlin’s view is more accurate than Strauss’s. We Jews have less of a problem because natural law theory did not become official teaching, “our magisterium,” as it did in the case of Catholicism. Furthermore, the problem Catholic natural law theorists have is that natural law, as formulated by Aquinas, became dogmatized and had to be treated as if it is divinely revealed. But then Catholics have the following problem: if natural law theory is universal, why are Catholics the only ones who are doing it or the only ones doing it correctly? This is why Catholics today are very happy when Jews, Protestants, and Muslims join the discourse on natural law, although non-Catholic theologians do not engage in it the exact same way Catholics do. In fact, sometimes when Jewish thinkers engage in natural law theory, it looks as strange as when Christians show they can read and explain the Talmud.



interview with david novak

123

What intrigues me is that you frame the issues of rights in terms of covenantal rights. Yes. But to what extent can your speaking about the language of the covenant be relevant to all Jews today? How can framing the issue of rights in terms of covenantal rights appeal to secular Jews who are no less a part of the Jewish people than religious Jews? Is it possible to translate your religious understanding of rights and make it relevant to secular Jews who are three-fifths or four-fifths of the Jewish people today? I don’t think that four-fifths of Jews consider themselves secular. I think four-fifths of Jews are just basically hanging onto the Jewish tradition by a thread. I don’t think that many Jews are militant secularists. They are definitely not like the Yiddishists I remember from my childhood or like old-time kibbutzniks in Israel. Nevertheless, there is indeed a problem here because whenever I start arguing this way, people say, “Yeah, but you’re not speaking for me.” I reply that I’m trying to speak to you, which is quite different from speaking for you. And I invite you secular Jews to speak to me for yourselves. That is how people of quite different views, but who still think they belong to the same community can still speak with each other. In other words, I can only say what I think that the Jewish tradition states on a particular moral issue, that the argument that I am working out of the Jewish tradition is more rationally compelling than what you are proposing. What the tradition says might pose a challenge to the secularist, but it is not for me, as a Jewish theologian, to think up reasons that will satisfy secularists. They have to do that for themselves. As you know, the Talmud states that you should study Torah not even for its own sake or for the right reason because eventually you’ll come to study it for its own sake and for the right reason. So, therefore, I like to say to secular Jews, “Look, it is still your tradition. So, listen to what it has to say. And if you really get caught up in it, maybe you’ll buy into it tomorrow more than you have today.” This is an ongoing public conversation. It is most acute in Israel.

124

interview with david novak

I fully agree. The religious-secular dialogue is most acute in Israel in a number of ways. Let me give you an example. A number of years ago I hosted for a Shabbat meal a well-known Israeli scholar, who is a secularist, but not antireligious. When he was about to leave he wanted to say something nice to thank us for the experience, but what he actually said was very painful for me to hear and it was painful for him to say. He said, “I remember houses like yours in Jerusalem when I was a child where I was welcome. I don’t know any such houses now.” Yes. This is precisely the tragedy because the Jewish community is a house divided—with a growing divide between religious and secular Jews. I have another example to illustrate the depth of the current divide. I was on the evaluation committee to assess the study of Jewish thought in Israeli universities. It used to be that religious Jews [the datiyim] were not adverse to universities. And I was happy to meet people at Bar Ilan University who said, “You know, I’m really getting a different approach to Jewish Studies and it hasn’t made me less religious,” and, as you know, Bar Ilan University was supposed to be a religious university. In other words, it is possible for religious Jews to be interested in the wider university culture. Yet many religious Jews today avoid Jewish Studies except when it is taught in a yeshiva or a synagogue. Conversely, it used to be the case that secular people in Israel who did not observe the mitzvot were interested in the Jewish tradition as part of their heritage. Yet today the growing gap between secular and religious is growing ever deeper both in Israel and in the Diaspora. In both places, more and more secular Jews want nothing to do with the Jewish tradition. That’s right. Many secular Jews are deeply turned off by the Jewish religious tradition. Unfortunately today, more and more, the Haredim [ultra-Orthodox Jews] have taken over religious life and they are not interested in culture at large. Their boys don’t go to universities any more, and their girls never did and are unlikely to ever do so.



interview with david novak

125

Sociologically speaking, what do you think is the trajectory? This is where Jewish philosophy could be helpful. Jewish philosophy seems to be less dogmatic than those who are only within the four cubits of halakha. The philosophical discourse is less dogmatic, but still it is not considered by most open-minded religious people to be something that is just apologetics or out of the loop. But the situation today is most problematic because the divide is incredible. Here is another example of the deep divide. As you know, many religious Jews study a page of Talmud every day (daf yomi), and when they all complete the entire Talmud, which happens about every seven and a half years, they have a big celebration. The celebration is held in a number of cities like Toronto and in New York. Here in Toronto, none of the so-called “modern” Orthodox rabbis were invited to the official celebration. Furthermore, a certain Hasidic Rebbe said he’s not coming to the celebration because there are going to be Zionist rabbis there. In other words, the schism characterizes not only life in Israel, but also Jewish communities in the Diaspora. Yes, but this is a relatively new development. I remember when Jewish religious discourse was actually in many ways more philosophical and there was less of a divide within the Jewish community. When I was a child in Chicago there were two Orthodox synagogues in my neighborhood. One had a Yiddish-speaking rabbi, and the other had an Englishspeaking rabbi, whom I came to know better and talk with. (Both of these rabbis, by the way, were very encouraging to me in my quest to become a Talmud student and an observant Jew.) The “modern” rabbi wasn’t anybody exceptional, yet he was trying to make arguments for why people should be Orthodox Jews, even though the vast majority of the members of his congregation was not strictly observant. On the other hand, the Reform rabbi, in whose congregation I became a bar mitzvah, was what used to be called “Classical Reform,” even though he had come from a very Orthodox background. He was a learned man and was also determined to persuade all Jews to be Reform Jews. These two rabbis were, in fact, similar, and they used philosophical-type argumentation in order to persuade other Jews to follow their preferred way of being Jewish. These two rabbis held regular conversations with anybody who would listen to them because they were actually trying to persuade other

126

interview with david novak

people to follow them as opposed to condemning other people for not following them. Today, many Orthodox rabbis simply condemn everybody else because they are presumably assimilationists, whereas many Reform rabbis condemn their opponents for being from the Dark Ages and for wanting a theocracy. Jewish philosophers could be very useful in terms of closing the divide within the Jewish community by helping to restore more rational discourse in the Jewish community. Of course, I refer to Jewish philosophers who are committed members of the Jewish community. Most of the people I know in Jewish philosophy indeed have a real connection to the Jewish community. I think that they can be very helpful in getting people to try to persuade one another on major issues facing Jews today. Do you mean persuade by means of reason? Well, it is more than persuasion by means of reason. I mean that when you talk to people who hold views other than your own, you have first to respect them. Secondly, you have to take a chance that maybe you won’t persuade them, but that they’ll persuade you. Well, let’s take one particular issue, a very divisive issue: gender. The role of women in the Jewish community—on institutional, ritualistic, and theological levels—has become very controversial. How can Jewish philosophers negotiate the divide in terms of the role of women? More generally, how do you understand the contribution or impact of feminism on contemporary Judaism? Is the debate about the reason for the growing schism within Judaism today? I don’t think so. I think that feminism is extremely important. And I hope this doesn’t sound, you know, patronizing, but my daughter, my eldest child (and a wife and mother of three children), is a leader in the Orthodox feminist world. Clearly, the role of women until recently was grossly neglected. Whether we should castigate the past for that is probably not going to accomplish anything. There are lots of social, political changes that inevitably brought about the changes in the status of women. Similarly, when Jews came in greater contact socially with non-Jews, all sorts of issues that could no longer be swept under the rug had to come out in the open. The same pertains to the status of women. Now, the question is, how to go about it?



interview with david novak

127

I don’t think simplistic egalitarianism is the way to go. There are profound differences between men and women, and these differences are important for halakha. Simplistic egalitarianism ignores these differences and means to turn women into men, or men into women. Nevertheless, the neuter voice only speaks of things, not persons. So, for example, counting women and men in the same minyan, despite very weak halakhic arguments for that, does not deal with the reasons the tradition seems to have prohibited that. Does the quest for equality necessitate ritual changes? The quest for equality depends on how we understand “equality” and what kind of equality we have in mind. In the fifth book of Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle distinguished between arithmetic and proportional equality. Arithmetic equality is A equals A. Proportional equality is A is to B as C is to D. In our case, that means what women do in Judaism is as important as what men do, and this should be recognized as such. But that does not mean that what women and men do is the same, that they are simply equal, that there is no difference between their respective rights and duties within Judaism. In terms of the relations between men and women, the first order of business is to determine all of those areas of Jewish law that allow, not command but allow, for men to exploit women. These loopholes should be immediately closed. An obvious example is the case of a woman who cannot get a divorce because the husband refuses and the community is not empowered or maybe even unwilling to do anything about it. There is the phenomenon of marriage annulment that can be effected by a Jewish court, which simply declares “this marriage is ended,” whether retroactively or henceforth. There are Talmudic precedents for it and I’ve written several articles on that question as have some other rabbis. Interestingly enough, there is a very secretive bet din (rabbinical court) in Israel that actually does it, even though they have to be very, very careful. So, this is one area in which men’s exploitation of women can be terminated and it is justified on religious grounds and can be enacted by a religious body. The other area is women’s participation in public ritual. Tova Hartman, Rabbi David Hartman’s daughter, founded congregation Shira Hadasha, where women can participate in public service with the bounds of halakha, at least as Tova Hartman and her followers see it. I personally find that congregation somewhat bizarre. I think that the best solution is where my

128

interview with david novak

daughter and her group are. Like some other women’s groups elsewhere, they established a women’s prayer group that meets on a regular basis and their whole question is whether they should do exactly the service like men or do something more creative. They’re more “conservative” (small “c”), and they don’t do certain things that men do. They don’t do anything that according to halakha requires an actual minyan like reciting Kaddish. Nevertheless, they can be liturgically more creative because they’re not bound to the strict order of Jewish prayer (matbe‘a shel tefillah). I admit that my daughter does not find this totally a hundred percent satisfactory, but she considers it a step in the right direction because it does not depart from what all but the most right-wing Orthodox rabbis consider to be acceptable. So is that a “separate but equal” kind of approach to the problem? Well, yes, it is, I guess, separate but equal. By and large, some of these questions could be solved if and when women simply say, “We demand this or that change.” However, many women in the Orthodox community have been reluctant to go the full feminist route because they see that actually, within the traditional system, women have certain powers that they wouldn’t have, should they demand simple equality. So the quest for equality is going to mean the loss of some privileges? Equality doesn’t come for free. The same can be said, more generally, for the Jewish quest for equality. The French Revolution was regarded by Jews as a blessing because it got us out of the ghetto, but the French Revolution also destroyed the autonomy of Jewish communities. Therefore, there was a rear guard that really regarded the Revolution and the ensuing emancipation was disastrous for the Jews because Jews were basically losing their internal power and gaining something that they considered to be quite nebulous, “equal rights.” Since the emancipation, Jews have attempted to come to terms with the notion of equality and none of the proposed solutions to the problem is completely satisfactory. The struggle about the place of women in traditional Judaism is just one example where people are talking to one another and attempting to work out solutions. And like any other great problem, this one, too, is never going to be fully solved, but certainly, I take women’s demands very seriously.



interview with david novak

129

So, what is the role of Jewish philosophy in thinking about gender in Judaism? Well, Jewish philosophy is going to have to discuss how much of halakha can be changed and how much of it can’t because it is too vital. In other words, we need to avoid the situation of radical surgery where the operation’s a success but the patient dies. Taking a very rational point of view of halakha, where really halakhic decisions have to be rationally justified, Jewish philosophy can find lots of areas where the reasoning was ahead of the actual legislated norm and that there are ways of changing it or adapting it. Yes, this is a halakhic conversation about gender within Judaism, but it is not philosophical. Well, it is philosophical in a sense that one is bringing philosophy to look at the field of ethics. There’s normative ethics and there is meta-ethics. This is similar to the difference between morality and ethics. Ethics is the theory and morality is the praxis. What matters is the actual law that is practiced, but reflecting on the actual practice is indeed philosophical. Any theory of ethics must always relate to actual ethical practice. For this reason I am critical of Levinas and I constantly chide my colleague and friend Bob Gibbs, who is a great Levinasian. He tells me that “Levinas talks about ethics all the time.” In response, I often say, ”The only ethical norm that I’ve ever got out of him is thou shalt not kill.” I’m not saying that Levinas should be dealing with practical problems all the time, but it seems to me that what he calls “ethics” is really a way of doing ontology. Especially after reading the dissertation of my student, Paul Nahme, I would say the same about Hermann Cohen. I actually think that Levinas sees ethics as the replacement of ontology. Well, ethics needs ontology, but ethics cannot replace it. If feminism has a Jewish philosophical perspective, then feminism has to say, like any other “ism,” that we will try our best to work within the Jewish tradition, but there are going to be times when the tradition trumps us.

130

interview with david novak

Or vice versa when the role of philosophy is to expose the limitations of the tradition. Yes, but then the question becomes can you critique the tradition using a criterion of critique that is superior to the tradition. That’s a very interesting hermeneutical question. Let me shift from talking about gender equality to another pressing issue, gender orientation. You have taken a very clear position on the issue of homosexuality, and it is fair to say that you interpret the tradition to hold an anti-homosexual view. Yes, you might say anti-homosexual, although I also recognize the distinction between homosexuality and homoerotic acts. Homoerotic acts are clearly proscribed or clearly prohibited. The question is, and it is an important question, what do we do with Jews who are practicing homosexuals? Yes, and we should add that some of them declare themselves to be religious Jews. Yes, yes, there are some religiously observant Jews who are practicing homosexuals and who are quite open about their sexual practices. Nevertheless, I think that homoerotic acts are not only proscribed to Jews by the Torah, but that the prohibition can be rationally justified, and that is why homoerotic acts are proscribed to all humans, whether Jews or Gentiles. It’s part of the seven Noahide commandments applicable to all human beings, which I hold to be the Jewish view of natural law. Most of the homosexual persons I know basically want to just live their lives, and they are not interested in wearing pink on their sleeves, so to speak. This is why I prefer the term “homosexual person” over the term “gay,” because “gay” already assumes a certain political stance. From the perspective of the Jewish tradition, at least as I understand it, if you are sexually attracted toward members of the same sex and same gender, then you have an emotional problem that affects your full participation in traditional Jewish life. What is the problem? The problem is that your sexual orientation inhibits you from doing things that everybody else in our community is expected to do, like marrying and faithfully sustaining a marriage with a person of the opposite sex. The question, then, becomes how are you going to live with this problem as a religiously observant Jew? In terms of homosexual orientation, the optimal answer would be to be



interview with david novak

131

celibate. Yet most people can’t be celibate and I fully understand this. So, if a homosexual is involved in a sexual relationship with another person of his or her sex (whether a “spouse” or a “partner”), they cannot expect the traditional Jewish community to bless this relationship by giving it official recognition in good faith. I can and do interact with homosexual Jews (and Gentiles) all the time, even though I do not share the demands of many of them for religious Jewish recognition of their unions. Well, that’s just like saying, some of my best friends are Jewish, but . . . Well, I admit that I’m struggling with this issue. I once had a graduate student who was a practicing homosexual. And he said that he thought he was going to have a problem working with me. And my answer to him was, “If you don’t ask for my blessing, you don’t get my condemnation. You’re not trying to be anything other than who you think you are. Certainly, if you are happy being a homosexual, you don’t need my approval, hence you won’t get my disapproval.” I might add, though, that this student was not studying with me as his rabbi; and, in fact, he is not Jewish. How does the concept of right fit into your understanding of gender orientation? Well, a right is a justified claim. And do you hold that the homosexual demand for equality is not a justified claim? Yes, indeed. I do not have a justified claim on the body of another man, and another man does not have a justified claim on my body. The only person who has such a claim on my body is my wife, and I am the only person who has such a claim on her body. And, I might add, that in the Jewish tradition that right may not be exercised at certain times, and that right may not be exercised in any way whatsoever. In other words, the Torah determines with whom, when, and how I may engage in sexual activity with another person. Even if the homoerotic act is consensual? Yes. There can be consensual adultery, but it is still adultery, even if both of the adulterers agree, and even if the two adults agree to the so-called open marriage. As for homosexual persons, I would also say, even though I

132

interview with david novak

know it is highly debatable, that they really don’t really want to be homosexual. More traditional forms of Freudian psychoanalysis have been helpful in helping homosexual persons come to terms with their sexual orientation, even helping them reorient or sublimate it. But to my knowledge, at least, all therapies that have attempted to “convert” homosexual persons have either failed or yielded bad results. No, no, I do not mean to convert homosexual persons by using aversion therapies. However, I don’t think a traditional Jewish perspective is ever going to simply say homosexuality is not a problem. Nonetheless, how we deal with homosexual persons is an issue that the tradition needs to address since homosexual Jews are in the community and, as much as possible, we should work with them. What about excluding homosexual Jews from certain religious activities, for example, becoming rabbis? Well, this issue has recently been debated by the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York (where I was ordained a rabbi in 1966), and it is most difficult. For me, a rabbi is a role model, and a person who is violating a basic prohibition of the Jewish tradition ought not to be a rabbi. I would say the same for somebody who eats pork and wants to be a rabbi or somebody who violates Shabbat. But you realize that there is a huge spectrum here in terms of how we interpret a certain prohibition of the Jewish tradition or what constitutes a violation of Jewish law? Oh, yes, I understand that. And I don’t have an answer for it. I am struggling with these issues. Still, it is better to have a bad answer in the right direction as opposed to saying, “I’m just going to close my ears and my head.” Clearly, I think based upon my reading of the Jewish tradition, as well as that of others, driving an automobile on Shabbat is a basic violation of the Torah. What did I do when I was a rabbi in congregations when there were many people who drove their cars to the synagogue? There were two extremes that I avoided. One extreme I avoided was standing up in the pulpit and railing against my congregants because I knew it was not going to accomplish anything. The other extreme would be standing up and writing a responsum as the Rabbinical Assembly wrote in 1950, which permitted driving a car on the Sabbath as long as you are driving to the



interview with david novak

133

synagogue. One of the first articles I wrote was tearing that opinion apart based upon a reading of one key Talmudic source. In fact, the main author of this responsum (along with two other colleagues) was a neighbor of mine, and I said to him: “I happen to know that you wrote the whole thing, because only you knew enough Talmud to distort that text as beautifully as you did. The two others wouldn’t know how to do it.” This responsum was really a work of art, but it was still a distortion of what the Talmud says. If somebody asks me, “Am I allowed to drive my car on Shabbat?” I would say no. But you’ve got to ask me. If you don’t ask me, you don’t ask for my condemnation, or my blessing. You seem to offer a pragmatic solution to this problem. Well, it’s pragmatic but the element of pragmatism is that if something is true in principle, but applying that principle in actual practice is going to have the exact opposite effect of what it was intended to have, then the application of the principle has to be modified so as to avoid an unintended consequence. It’s true in principle, but I don’t have to apply it or promote it. This is only a kind of a fallback position. Can you take that approach and apply it to the question of pluralism in contemporary Judaism? We already discussed the current schism in the Jewish community, both in Israel and in the Diaspora. Could this pragmatic thinking allow us to resolve the problem? Well, I don’t resolve the problem because some of these problems are like diabetes: it’s a disease in which you can handle the symptoms, but the only way we know now of curing it is cutting out the pancreas. This is precisely the kind of radical surgery in which the operation’s a success, but the patient dies. Instead of talking in general terms it is far better to zero in on some very particular problems. Let’s solve our problems locally before we propose grand solutions. The same can be said for the Israel-Arab issue. Instead of debating about Jerusalem as an abstract entity, let’s talk about this or that street where the border should go. In other words, with contested matters, like homosexuality or feminism, one has to get into the specifics? Yes, one must do it inductively rather than offer a grand solution that we will now deduce what everybody else should do.

134

interview with david novak

With this suggestion in mind, what do you consider to be the major challenges for Jews in the twenty-first century? And how should we respond to them? I think that it is the great question that Israeli political theorists deal with, namely, how can Israel be a Jewish state and a democracy? Jews in the Diaspora have a similar problem: how can we be committed to a democratic government and way of life that does not basically require us to be, in the words of Yehudah Leib Gordon, “a Jew in your tent and a human being outside.” Those are the key issues for the twenty-first century. In my book on Zionism, I argue that a Jewishly grounded state offers us a better grounding for individual rights than a secular state or secularist theories of rights, like that of John Rawls. In this regard, I see myself in continuity with a teacher of mine, Leo Strauss. For Professor Strauss, to think about politics is to think about political philosophy rather than about political science. Indeed, at the University of Chicago he was listed as a Professor of Political Philosophy rather than as Professor of Political Science. So political philosophy is the challenge for the foreseeable future for the Jewish people? Definitely. Reflecting philosophically about Jewish existence is precisely the area where religiously minded and more secularly minded Jews can find a lot of common ground to work out their differences and attempt to work together without trying to defeat each other. Within the rubric of political philosophy, what kind of theorizing would you envision? Would it be exegetical, theological, or strictly philosophical? How do you see yourself engaging in this conversation? Oh, I think it would be a philosophical discourse that can also generate a hermeneutic, because I don’t think a philosophy comes out of a hermeneutic. Both in Israel and outside of Israel, there are great issues we must reflect about when we are committed to the Jewish tradition. We need to ask what does the Jewish tradition have to offer and why should we accept it. My approach is inspired by the Talmudic principle of “the Torah speaks in human language.” The rabbinic sages had to explain why the Bible



interview with david novak

135

repeats certain words and phrases if every word is supposed to mean something. In the Middle Ages, the Talmudic principle was interpreted to mean that the Torah had to speak in a way that most people could understand the philosophical and scientific truths revealed in Torah. But in our age, the meaning of the Talmudic dictum is that the teachings of the Torah—when they apply to what I call general morally significant phenomena—have to be spoken in human language. When I consider philosophy, I see language and here I agree with Popper rather than Wittgenstein. There is philosophical language and it is not just derivative. The best way human beings have ever spoken is philosophically, and therefore that’s what they should bring to the Torah, both Written Torah and Oral Torah. So, are you optimistic about the future of Jewish philosophy? I’m a pretty optimistic person and I’m optimistic about everything. When somebody who’s old enough to be my child or grandchild expresses pessimism about the future of Jewish philosophy, I tell that person, “You should have seen it when I was your age . . .” That is to say, Jewish philosophy today is in a much better place than it has been since the mid-twentieth century? Yes. For older people, everything in the past seems better. So, young people are amazed when someone older says that the past was really awful and that, as bad as the present is, one is glad to be living in the present. In other words, we should cherish where we are philosophically, according to you? We should cherish where we are, and we need to take advantage of the fact that there are people out there who really want to hear what we’ve got to say. Without boasting or bragging, the best compliment I’ve ever gotten recently was in a philosophical talk that I gave to a synagogue audience when a woman in the audience came up to me and said, “Thank you for talking to me as if I’m an adult.” In other words, she said, “Thank you for respecting my intellect and for appealing to me as an intellectual person.”

136

interview with david novak

This incident brings me back to Plato’s dialogue, The Meno, in which the slave boy, Meno, shows that he’s really a philosopher even though he has no education whatsoever. Through questioning, Socrates elicits knowledge from him and shows that he is able to philosophize. This is education at its best. By the same token, Jewish philosophers who are committed to the Jewish community can treat the members of the Jewish community as intelligent interlocutors who are philosophically capable. As a Jew who is committed to living in the Jewish community, I find that approach very encouraging and very hopeful. So, is education the social responsibility of the Jewish philosopher? Oh, I think so. I definitely think so. I think that it’s a mistake for philosophers to become a guild where they’re only interested in their own professional problems. Jewish philosophy only makes sense if it’s minimally philosophy of Judaism, conducted by Jews who are Jews first and philosophers second—that it’s a philosophy of something to which you’re existentially committed. Then you can say, why am I doing Jewish philosophy? If you’re doing philosophy of something that you’re not committed to, I think that you’ve got an existential problem. By analogy, would we take a philosopher of law seriously who wasn’t committed to some particular body of positive law? Interestingly, when you chose to speak about the problems of contemporary Jewish existence, you made no reference to the Holocaust or at least to its philosophical implications. Have we already handled the Holocaust philosophically? No, I don’t think we have handled it philosophically. I don’t think that the Holocaust is philosophically handle-able. One of the really significant Jewish philosophers of the twentieth century was Professor Emil Fackenheim, whose main career was here at the University of Toronto. By the way, the last Shabbat meal Emil Fackenheim ate in Toronto, before he went back to Jerusalem and died a few months later, was in my house. I knew Professor Fackenheim already when I was a student and had met him several times. I think that he had the ability to be the Franz Rosenzweig of the next generation, especially as shown in his brilliant essay (in the early 1960s) on divine command and Kantian autonomy. But then he made the Holocaust the center of his thinking.



interview with david novak

137

I gather that, for you, this was a bad move. I think it was a bad move because I think that the Holocaust is like a black hole because there is no explanation for it. Like an eclipse of the sun, it’s something we can only look at sideways. We have to look at it sideways. Anybody who ignores the Holocaust, I wonder, where is that person living? But anybody who has made the Holocaust the center of his or her thinking has been destroyed by it because the Holocaust is like an abyss; you can’t stand on it. I do teach Fackenheim’s To Mend the World in a course called “Philosophical Responses to the Holocaust,” and I fight with the book. However, it is impossible to ignore the Holocaust as, for example, Mordecai Kaplan did, and who remained as optimistic about humanity after the war as he was before the war, as if nothing had happened in between. Where was he? He was enamored of modernity and, in the end, he became irrelevant. When I teach the Holocaust, I also grapple with Hannah Arendt. She was a philosopher and a Jew, but I am not sure if she was a Jewish philosopher. Her 1963 book, Eichmann in Jerusalem, is a badly misunderstood book. Because the thesis of banality of evil was not that evil is banal, but that very banal people can be very evil nonetheless. Arendt was making a natural law argument in this book, which few people recognize. Part of the problem with her book, and the negative reaction it received from many Jews (and I’m old enough to remember the furor of the reaction), was her highly ambivalent relationship with the Jewish community. Yet, if you distill that book and take out all of the put-downs and all the condescending remarks about the Jewish people and the State of Israel, you will find what Marxists call a “rootless cosmopolitan,” who is writing as a philosopher. And I think that she was saying a number of things that are in the Jewish tradition that she may not have known. In other words, I like the book better than what I know of Hannah Arendt (whom I never met in person). Do you refer to her views on the problem of evil? Yes, I refer to her approach to the problem of evil in general and to the Holocaust in particular. She pondered about how does one judge the perpetrators, but she did not make the Holocaust the center of her thinking.

138

interview with david novak

As for the problem of evil, can philosophy give us a satisfying treatment? No, no. That is where I think theology is much more relevant and appropriate than philosophy. I recently reflected on this issue in an essay called “Defending Niebuhr from Hauerwas.” Stanley Hauerwas, the eminent Protestant theologian, is (I think) a friend of the Jewish people and of Judaism, and I am very fond of him. But I think that he misunderstood Niebuhr, so I try to show how Niebuhr is very Jewish in his thinking. Niebuhr said that it is easier to believe in original sin than in the existence of God—a statement that comes out of real theological depth. His approach to the problem of evil was supported by Iris Murdoch, who was both a novelist and a philosopher. She once commented about analytic ethicists at Oxford as follows: “They’re great for dealing with people who play cricket and eat roast beef on Sunday and drink their pint, but they’re absolutely useless in dealing with people who want to commit suicide, join the Communist Party, or blow up parliament.” Well, by contrast, the Jewish religious tradition dealt with radical people as well as with the problem of evil, basically as rebellion against God. Fackenheim was right in saying that philosophers have done a very bad job of dealing with the existence of evil. Going all the way back to Plato, most philosophers have argued that evil is nothing but a privation of the good. This position doesn’t explain anything because it doesn’t recognize that doing evil is fully intended. It is not simply a misdirected act that intends to do good, whose error is choosing the wrong means for the right end. How would you wish to be remembered? What do you consider your main contribution to Jewish philosophy? Well, I haven’t thought about my legacy, as it were, since that is usually what somebody who believes his life to be near its end thinks about. Thank God, as far as I know, the end of my life is not imminent, so I’m still working full-time, looking forward not backwards. In other words, I’m not yet contemplating my own eulogy. Nevertheless, to comply with your request, let me say that if I have made any significant contribution to Jewish intellectual discourse, it is my retrieval of the question of natural law. I have tried to show that there are, indeed there must be, intelligible preconditions that alone enable intelligent, morally earnest human persons to accept the authority of



interview with david novak

139

the divinely revealed Torah and its tradition as an intelligent act and not just as a leap of faith. Natural law is the body of norms that comprise these intelligible preconditions. But, contrary to some of the greatest modern Jewish philosophers, the revealed Torah is not reducible to natural law qua universal ethics. The revealed Torah enables Jews to enjoy a direct relationship with God, for which a natural law-governed relationship with fellow humans is necessary (since the covenant is primarily the relationship between God and the people), but of which a natural law-governed interhuman relationship is not the sufficient cause or ultimate purpose. That is the a priori function of natural law in Judaism. Its a posteriori function is to insist that applications of Torah law (halakha) and the explication of Torah ideas (aggadah) be rational, that their reasons be persuasively demonstrable. In this way, the assumption of natural law functions as a goad to discover Judaism’s rationale as well as functioning as a limit on fanatical, chauvinistic, or authoritarian interpretations of what Judaism truly teaches. It also enables Jews to not just happen to agree with certain public policy positions in secular society for what seems to be very private “Jewish” reasons, but to advocate them persuasively through public reason, that is, to be proactive and not just reactive politically. Whether I have actually accomplished anything significant as a Jewish philosopher or not (or simply as a Jew) in the world, that question can only be answered by God at that far off time when all human actions will be judged, when this world will have run its full course and the world-yetto-come will finally arrive in its wake. Thank you very much for taking the time to talk with us. Your detailed and comprehensive answers to my questions have manifested your depth as a theologian, a social theorist, and a public intellectual.

Selected Bibliography Books   1. Law and Theology in Judaism, vol. 1. New York: KTAV, 1974.   2. Suicide and Morality: The Theories of Plato, Aquinas and Kant and Their Relevance for Suicidology. New York: Scholars Studies Press, 1975.   3. Law and Theology in Judaism, vol. 2. New York: KTAV, 1976.   4. The Image of the Non-Jew in Judaism: An Historical and Constructive Study of the Noahide Laws. Toronto Studies in Theology, vol. 14. New York and Toronto: Edwin Mellen Press, 1983. 2nd rev. ed., edited by Matthew LaGrone. Oxford: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2011.   5. Halakhah in a Theological Dimension. Brown Judaic Studies Series, no. 68. Chico, CA: Scholars Press, 1985.   6. Jewish-Christian Dialogue: A Jewish Justification. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989. Paperback ed., 1992.   7. Jewish Social Ethics. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992.   8. The Theology of Nahmanides Systematically Presented. Brown Judaic Studies Series, no. 271. Atlanta, GA: Scholars Press, 1992.   9. The Election of Israel: The Idea of the Chosen People. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Paperback ed., 2007. Published in Italian as L’Elezione d’Israele: L’idea del popolo eletto, translated by Franco Bassani. Brescia: Paideia Editrice, 2001. 10. Natural Law in Judaism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. 11. Covenantal Rights: A Study in Jewish Political Theory. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000. 12. The Jewish Social Contract: An Essay in Political Theology. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005. 13. Talking with Christians: Musings of a Jewish Theologian. Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 2005; London: SCM Press, 2006. 14. The Sanctity of Human Life. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2007. 15. Tradition in the Public Square: A David Novak Reader, edited with an introduction by Randi Rashkover and Martin Kavka. Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 2008. 16. In Defense of Religious Liberty. Wilmington, DE: ISI Books, 2009.

142

selected bibliography Edited Books

17. (With N. M. Samuelson) Judaism and Scientific Cosmology. Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1986. 18. (With N. M. Samuelson) Proceedings of the Academy for Jewish Philosophy 1987–1989. Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1990. 19. Leo Strauss and Judaism: Jerusalem and Athens Revisited. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1996. 20. (With T. Frymer-Kensky, P. Ochs, D. Sandmel, and M. Signer) Christianity in Jewish Terms. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2000. 21. (With M. Kavka and Z. Braiterman) Cambridge History of Modern Jewish Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. Book Chapters 22. “Euthanasia.” In Compendium on Medical Ethics: Jewish Moral, Ethical and Religious Principles in Medical Practice, 6th ed., edited by D. M. Feldman and F. Rosner, 106–8. New York: Federation of Jewish Philanthropies, 1984. 23. “The Treatment of Muslims and Islam in the Legal Writings of Maimonides.” In Studies in Islamic and Jewish Traditions, edited by W. M. Brinner and S. D. Ricks, 233–50. Brown Judaic Studies Series, no. 110. Chico, CA: Scholars Press, 1986. 24. “Halakhah.” In Encyclopedia of Religion, vol. 6, edited by M. Eliade, 164–73. New York: Macmillan, 1986. Reprinted in Judaism: A People and Its History, edited by R. M. Seltzer. New York: Macmillan, 1989. 25. “The Phenomenology of Jewish-Christian Dialogue.” In Proceedings of the Institute for Distinguished Leaders, 6–14. Waltham, MA: Brandeis University, 1989. 26. “Reasons for the Commandments,” In Halakhah and the Modern Jew: Essays in Honor of Horace Bier, edited by J. L. Rohm and L. Levy, 18–22. Mt. Vernon, NY: Union for Traditional Judaism, 1989. 27. “Maimonides and the Science of the Law.” In Jewish Law Association Studies 4, edited by B. S. Jackson and S. M. Passamaneck, 99–134. Atlanta, GA: Scholars Press, 1990. 28. “Self-Contraction of the Godhead in Kabbalistic Theology.” In Neoplatonism and Jewish Thought, edited by L. E. Goodman, 299–318. Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1992.



selected bibliography

143

29. “Maimonides’ Concept of Practical Reason,” In Rashi 1040–1990: Hommage a Ephraim E. Urbach, edited by G. Sed-Rajna, 615–29. Paris: Cerf, 1993. 30. “Is There a Concept of Individual Rights in Jewish Law?” In Jewish Law Association Studies 7, edited by S. M. Passamaneck and M. Finley, 129–52. Atlanta, GA: Scholars Press, 1994. 31. “Spinoza’s Challenge to the Doctrine of Election.” In Commandment and Community: New Essays in Jewish Legal and Political Philosophy, edited by D. H. Frank, 217–43. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1995. 32. “The Talmud as a Source for Philosophical Reflection.” In History of Jewish Philosophy, edited by D. H. Frank and O. Leaman, 62–80. London and New York: Routledge, 1997. Reprinted in Why Study Talmud in the Twenty-First Century?, edited by Paul Socken, 223–40. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2009. 33. “Alexander Altmann as a Theologian.” In Perspectives on Jewish Thought and Mysticism, edited by A. L. Ivry, E. R. Wolfson, and A. Arkush, 483–97. Amsterdam: Harwood Academic Publishers, 1998. 34. “Jewish Theology and International Society.” In International Society, edited by D. R. Mapel and T. Nardin, 185–200. Princeton, NJ: Prince­ ton University Press, 1998. Reprinted in Law, Politics and Morality in Judaism, edited by Michael Walzer, 128–45. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006. 35. “Religious Communities, Secular Society, and Sexuality: One Jewish Opinion.” In Sexual Orientation and Human Rights in American Religious Discourse, edited by S. M. Olyan and M. C. Nussbaum, 11–28. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998. 36. “Noahide Law According to Hermann Cohen.” [German: “Das noachidsiche Naturrrecht bei Hermann Cohen.”] In Religion der Vernunft aus den Quellen des Judentums: Tradition und Ursprungsdenken in Hermann Cohens Spaetwerk, edited by H. Holzey, G. Motzkin, and H. Wiedebach, 225–43. Hildesheim: Olms, 2000. 37. “The Clinton Scandal: Law and Morals.” In Aftermath: The Clinton Impeachment and the Presidency in the Age of Political Spectacle, edited by L. V. Kaplan and B. I. Moran, 267–75. New York and London: New York University Press, 2001. 38. “Emmanuel Levinas and Ethical Monotheism.” In Ethical Monotheism Past and Present: Essays in Honor of Wendell S. Dietrich, edited by T. M. Vial and M. A. Hadley, 240–58. Providence: Brown Judaic Studies, 2001.

144

selected bibliography

39. “Land and People: One Jewish Perspective.” In Boundaries and Justice: Diverse Ethical Perspectives, edited by D. Miller and S. H. Hashmi, 213– 36. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001. 40. “The Doctrine of Creation and the Idea of Nature.” In Judaism and Ecology, edited by H. Tirosh-Samuelson, 155–75. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002. 41. “Toward a Jewish Public Philosophy in America.” In Jews and the American Public Square, edited by A. Mittleman, J. D. Sarna, and R. Licht, 331–56. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2002. 42. “Do Jews and Christians Worship the Same God?” [French: “Les Juifs et les Chretiens Reverent-ils le Meme Dieu?”] In Le Christianisme au Miroir du Judaisme, edited by Shmuel Trigano, 95–132. Paris: In Press Editions, 2003. 43. “A Jewish Policy on Church-State Relations.” In Religion as a Public Good, edited by Alan Mittleman, 141–59. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2003. 44. “Sexual Responsibility and Jewish Law.” In Public Policy and Social Issues: Jewish Sources and Perspectives, edited by M. J. Breger, 49–64. Westport, CT: Praeger, 2003. 45. “Can Capital Punishment Ever Be Justified in the Jewish Tradition?” In Religion and the Death Penalty, edited by J. Elshtain, 31–47. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2004. 46. “Human Dignity and the Social Contract.” In Recognizing Religion in a Secular Society, edited by D. Farrow, 51–68. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2004. 47. “The Idea of Natural Law in the Thought of Hermann Cohen and Its Rabbinic Sources.” [Hebrew: “Ra‘yon Hoq tiv‘i be-Haguto shel Hermann Cohen.”] In Neti‘ot LeDavid: Jubilee Volume for David Weiss Halivni, edited by Y. Elman, E. B. Halivni, and Z. A. Steinfeld, 131–42. Jerusalem: Orhot Press, 2004 (Heb. sec.). 48. “Is Judaism a Universal Religion?” [French: “Le Judaisme est-il une Religion Universelle?”] In Guerre et Paix dens le Judaisme, edited by S. Trigano, 157–74. Paris: In Press Editions, 2004. 49. “Revealed Law and Democracy.” In Islam and the Challenge of Democracy, edited by J. Cohen and D. Chasman, 87–92. Princeton, NJ: Prince­ ton University Press, 2004. 50. “The Covenant in Rabbinic Thought.” In Two Faiths, One Covenant?, edited by E. B. Korn and J. T. Pawlikowski, 65–80. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2005.



selected bibliography

145

51. “God and Human Rights in a Secular Society.” In Does Human Rights Need God?, edited by E. M. Bucar and B. Barnett, 48–57. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2005. Reprinted in Jewish Bible Theology, edited by Isaac Kalimi, 89–99. Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 2012. 52. “Hermann Cohen on State and Nation: A Contemporary Review.” In Hermann Cohen’s Critical Idealism, edited by R. Munk, 259–79. Dordrecht: Springer, 2005. 53. “Jewish Marriage: Nature, Covenant, and Contract.” In Marriage, Sex, and Family in Judaism, edited by M. J. Broyde, 61–87. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2005. Reprinted in Covenant Marriage in Comparative Perspective, edited by J. Witte and E. Ellison, 26–52. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2005. 54. “Jurisprudence.” In The Cambridge Companion to Maimonides, edited by K. Seeskin, 221–44. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. 55. “Revelation.” In Modern Judaism: An Oxford Guide, edited by N. de Lange and M. Freud-Kandel, 278–89. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. 56. “The Dialectic Between Theory and Practice in Rabbinic Thought.” In Study and Knowledge in Jewish Thought, edited by H. Kreisel, 121–35. Beer Sheva: Ben-Gurion University of the Negev Press, 2006. 57. “Gentiles in Rabbinic Thought.” In Cambridge History of Judaism 4: The Late Roman-Rabbinic Period, edited by S. T. Katz, 647–62. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. 58. “The Voluntary Covenant.” [French: “L’alliance volontaire.”] In La Cité Biblique, edited by S. Trigano, 77–90. Paris: In Press Editions, 2006. 59. “Nostrae Aetate and Dabru Emet.” In Jews and Catholics Together, edited by M. Attridge, 72–89. Ottawa: Novalis, 2007. 60. “Jewish Eschatology.” In The Oxford Handbook of Eschatology, edited by J. L. Walls, 113–31. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008. 61. “Natural Law, Human Dignity, and the Protection of Human Property.” In Rethinking Business Management, edited by S. Gregg and J. R. Stoner, Jr., 50–62. Princeton, NJ: The Witherspoon Institute, 2008. Reprinted in Profit, Prudence, and Virtue: Essays on Ethics, Business, and Management, edited by S. Gregg and J. Stoner, 42–56. Exeter, UK: Imprint Academic, St Andrews Studies in Philosophy and Public Affairs, 2009. 62. “Can We Be Mamonideans Today?” in Maimonides and His Heritage, edited by I. Dobbs-Weinstein, L. E. Goodman, and J. A. Grady, 193– 209. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2009.

146

selected bibliography

63. “Heschel’s Phenomenology of Revelation.” In Abraham Joshua Heschel: Philosophy, Theology, and Interreligious Dialogue, edited by S. Krajewski and A. Lipszyc, 36–46. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 2009. 64. “The End of the Law: A Significant Difference Between Judaism and Christianity.” In Transforming Relations: Essays in Honor of Michael A. Signer, edited by F. T. Harkins, 34–49. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2010. 65. “The Enlightenment Project, Spinoza, and the Jews.” In Religion, the Enlightenment, and the New Global Order, edited by J. M. Owen IV and J. J. Owen, 109–39. New York: Columbia University Press, 2010. 66. “The Judaic Foundation of Rights.” In Christianity and Human Rights: An Introduction, edited by J. Witte, Jr., and F. S. Alexander, 47–63. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. 67. “Social Contract in Modern Jewish Thought: A Theological Critique.” In Theology and the Soul of the Liberal State, edited by L. V. Kaplan and C. L. Cohen, 53–76. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2010. 68. “On Human Dignity.” In The Quest for a Common Humanity, edited by K. Berthelot and M. Morgenstern, 271–88. Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2011. 69. “Creation.” In Cambridge History of Modern Jewish Philosophy, edited by D. Novak, M. Kavka, and Z. Braiterman, 371–98. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. 70. “The Elimination of Mutilation and Torture in Rabbinic Thought and Practice: A Jewish Comment amidst the Civil Liberties/National Security Debate.” In Civil Liberties, National Security and Prospects for Consensus, edited by E. D. Reed and M. Dumper, 210–24. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. 71. “Haunted by the Ghost of Weimar: Leo Strauss’ Critique of Hans Kelsen.” In The Weimar Moment, edited by L. V. Kaplan and R. Koshar, 393–408. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2012. 72. “A Jewish Theory of Human Rights.” In Religion and Human Rights, edited by J. Witte and M. C. Green, 27–41. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012. 73. “Maimonides’ Treatment of Christianity and Its Normative Implications.” In Jewish Theology and World Religions, edited by A. GoshenGottstein and E. Korn, 217–33. Oxford: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2012.



selected bibliography

147

Journal Articles 74. “Buber’s Critique of Heidegger.” Modern Judaism 5 (1985): 125–40. 75. “Religion and Science: Maimonides and Neoplatonic Cosmology.” Hawaii Jewish News (Special Supplement) (November 1987): 5, 8. 76. “The Role of Dogma in Judaism.” Theology Today 45 (1988): 49–61. 77. “Germans Against Hitler: The Witness of the White Rose.” First Things (April 1990): 42–46. 78. “Judaism, Zionism, Messianism: Telling Them Apart.” First Things (February 1991): 22–25. 79. “When Jews Are Christians.” First Things (November 1991): 42–46. Reprinted in The Chosen People in an Almost Chosen Nation: Jews and Judaism in America, edited by R. J. Neuhaus, 92–102. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2002. 80. “Law of Moses, Law of Nature.” First Things (February 1996): 45–49. Italian translation in Daemon 4 (2004): 213–24. 81. “Suicide Is Not a Private Choice.” First Things (August/September 1997): 31–34. Enlarged annotated version, “Privacy.” In Natural Law and Contemporary Public Policy, edited by D. F. Forte, 13–28. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 1998. Reprinted in Life and Learning VIII: Proceedings of the Eighth University Faculty for Life Conference, edited by J. W. Koterski, 317–25. Washington, DC: University Faculty for Life, 1999). 82. “The Jewish Ethical Tradition in the Modern University” (Inaugural Lecture of the J. Richard and Dorothy Shiff Chair of Jewish Studies, University of Toronto, September 30, 1997). In ARC: The Journal of the Faculty of Religious Studies, McGill University 26 (1998): 125–39. Revised version, Journal of Education 180 (1998): 21–39. 83. “Judaism and Natural Law.” American Journal of Jurisprudence 43 (1998): 117–34. Reprinted in American Philosophical Association Newsletter on Philosophy and Law 1 (2001): 134–41. 84. “The Mind of Maimonides.” First Things (February 1999): 27–33. Reprinted in The Second One Thousand Years, edited by R. J. Neuhaus, 15–27. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2001. 85. “Edith Stein, Apostate Saint.” First Things (October 1999): 15–17. Revised version in Talking with Christians (#13, above), 146–66. 86. “Jewish Marriage and Civil Law: A Two-Way Street?” George Washington Law Review 68 (2000): 1059–78.

148

selected bibliography

 87. “Is Natural Law a Border Concept Between Judaism and Christianity?” Journal of Religious Ethics 32 (2004): 237–54.  88. “Human Rights of the ‘Other’ in Jewish Tradition.” [Italian: “I Diritti Umani dell ‘Altro’ nella Tradizione Ebraica.”] Annuario Direcom (Lugano, Svizzera) 5 (2006): 51–68.  89. On Jewish-Christian Dialogue (#6, above), Review and Expositor 103, no. 1 (Winter 2006): 266–68.  90. “The Universality of Jewish Ethics: A Rejoinder to Secularist Critics.” Journal of Religious Ethics 36, no. 2 (2008): 181–211.   91. “The Theopolitics of Abraham Joshua Heschel.” Modern Judaism 29 (2009): 106–16.   92. “Divine Justice/Divine Command.” Studies in Christian Ethics 23 (2010): 6–20.   93. “Why Are the Jews Chosen?” First Things (April 2010): 35–37. Book Reviews  94. Review of Discerning the Way: A Theology of the Jewish-Christian Reality, by Paul van Buren. Judaism 31 (1982): 112–20.  95. Review of Aufsaetze, Uebertragungen und Briefe, by Franz Rosenzweig, edited by K. Thieme. Religious Studies Review 12 (1986): 146.  96. Review of The Idea of Humanity: The Legacy of Hermann Cohen to Philosophy and Theology, by William Kluback. Midstream 33 (1987): 60–61.  97. Review of Dogma in Medieval Jewish Thought: From Maimonides to Abravanel, by Menachem Kellner. Philosophy East and West 39 (1989): 98–100.  98. Review of Saadiah ben Joseph al-Fayyumi—The Book of Theodicy: Translation and Commentary on the Book of Job, by Lenn E. Goodman. Jewish Quarterly Review 81 (1990): 195–98.  99. Review of Spinoza and Other Heretics, by Yirmiyahu Yovel. Hadassah Magazine 80 (1990): 36. 100. Review of Between Kant and Kabbalah: An Introduction to Isaac Breuer’s Philosophy of Judaism, by Alan Mittleman. First Things (December 1991): 54–55. 101. Review of Interpreting Maimonides: Studies in Methodology, Metaphysics, and Moral Philosophy, by Marvin Fox. First Things (December 1991): 55.



selected bibliography

149

102. Review of Maimonides on Judaism and the Jewish People, by Menachem Kellner. Shofar 11 (1992): 150–52. 103. Review of The Pursuit of the Ideal: Jewish Writings of Steven Schwarzschild, edited by Menachem Kellner. Philosophy East and West 42 (1992): 195–98. 104. Review of The “Shabbes Goy”: A Study in Halakhic Flexibility, by Jacob Katz, translated by Y. Lerner. Jewish Quarterly Review 88 (1992): 247–49. 105. Review of Jewish Law: History, Sources, Principles, 4 vols., by Menachem Elon, translated by B. Auerbach and M. J. Sykes. Vera Lex 14, nos. 1–2 (1994): 51–54. 106. Review of Philosophy and Law, by Leo Strauss. First Things (December 1995): 74. 107. Review of Torah and Constitution: Essays in American Jewish Thought, by Milton Konvitz. Vera Lex 15 (1995): 72–76. 108. “Jewish Rationalism Is Alive.” Review-Essay of God of Abraham, by Lenn E. Goodman. Midstream 43 (1997): 42–44. 109. Review of The Way of the Lord Jesus 3: Difficult Moral Questions, by Germain Grisez. First Things (December 1998): 58–61. 110. Review of Kaddish, by Leon Wieseltier. First Things (March 1999): 56–58. 111. Review of Matters of Life and Death: A Jewish Approach to Modern Medical Ethics, by Elliot Dorff. First Things (November 1999): 66–70. 112. Review of The Jewish Political Tradition, vol. 1, edited by M. Walzer. The New Republic, no. 4,463 (July 31, 2000): 31–37. 113. Review of The Jewish State: The Struggle for Israel’s Soul, by Yoram Hazony. First Things (February 2001): 37–42. 114. Review of Maimonides’ Empire of Light, by Ralph Lerner. First Things (November 2001): 62–63. 115. Review of Aristotle and the Theology of the Living Immortals, by Richard Bodeus, translated by J. Garrett. Review of Metaphysics 53 (2002): 620–22. 116. Review of The Prophets, by Norman Podhoretz, and The Beginning of Wisdom, by Leon R. Kass. The New Republic, no. 4,608 (May 12, 2003): 29–34. 117. Review of The God Delusion, by Richard Dawkins. Azure 28 (Spring 2007): 113–31. 118. Review of Jesus in the Talmud, by Peter Schäfer. The New Republic, no. 4,818 (2007): 42–45.

150

selected bibliography

119. Review of Sacred Attunement: A Jewish Theology, by Michael Fishbane. First Things (February 2009): 56–58. 120. Review of Punishment and Freedom, by Devora Steinmetz. Journal Of Religion (2010): 93–94.