David R. Blumenthal: Living with God and Humanity : Living with God and Humanity [1 ed.] 9789004279759, 9789004279735

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David R. Blumenthal

Library of Contemporary Jewish Philosophers Editor-in-Chief

Hava Tirosh-Samuelson, Arizona State University Editor

Aaron W. Hughes, University of Rochester

Volume 7

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

David R. Blumenthal Living with God and Humanity Edited by

Hava Tirosh-Samuelson and Aaron W. Hughes

Leiden • boston 2014

Cover illustration: Courtesy of David R. Blumenthal. The series Library of Contemporary Jewish Philosophers was generously supported by the Baron Foundation. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data David R. Blumenthal / edited by Hava Tirosh-Samuelson and Aaron W. Hughes.   p. cm. — (Library of contemporary Jewish philosophers, ISSN 2213-6010 ; volume 7)  Includes bibliographical references.  Summary: “David R. Blumenthal is Jay and Leslie Cohen Professor of Judaic Studies at Emory University. He has contributed greatly to the growth of Jewish Studies, the place of Judaism in Religious Studies, interreligious dialogue, and the reframing of Judaism in light of the Holocaust, postmodernism, and poststructuralism. For Blumenthal, theology is an ongoing reflection about everything we believe and do in the context of the living tradition”—Provided by publisher.  ISBN 978-90-04-27973-5 (hardback : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-90-04-27974-2 (pbk. : alk. paper)— ISBN 978-90-04-27975-9 (e-book) 1. Blumenthal, David R.—Philosophy. 2. Jewish philosophy— 21st century. I. Tirosh-Samuelson, Hava, 1950– editor. II. Hughes, Aaron W., 1968– editor.  B5800.D395 2014  181’.06—dc23 2014022395 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 978-90-04-27973-5 (hardback) ISBN 978-90-04-27975-9 (e-book) This hardback is also published in paperback under ISBN 978-90-04-27974-2. Copyright 2014 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill Nijhoff, Global Oriental and Hotei ­Publishing. 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 The Contributors .............................................................................................. vii Editors’ Introduction to Series ..................................................................... ix David R. Blumenthal: An Intellectual Portrait ........................................ 1  Hava Tirosh-Samuelson Personality .......................................................................................................... 35  David R. Blumenthal Liturgies of Anger ............................................................................................ 47  David R. Blumenthal How Might Another Shoah Be Prevented? .............................................. 67  David R. Blumenthal Maimonides’ Philosophic Mysticism ......................................................... 85  David R. Blumenthal Interview with David R. Blumenthal ......................................................... 111  Hava Tirosh-Samuelson and Aaron W. Hughes Select Bibliography .......................................................................................... 153

The Contributors Hava Tirosh-Samuelson (Ph.D., Hebrew University, 1978) is Irving and Miriam Lowe Professor of Modern Judaism, the Director of Jewish Studies, and Professor of History at Arizona State University in Tempe, AZ. Her research focuses on Jewish intellectual history, Judaism and ecology, science and religion, and feminist theory. In addition to numerous articles and book chapters in academic journals and edited volumes, she is the author of the award-winning Between Worlds: The Life and Work of Rabbi David ben Judah Messer Leon (1991) and the author of Happiness in Premodern Judaism: Virtue, Knowledge, and Well-Being in Premodern Judaism (2003). She is also the editor of Judaism and Ecology: Created World and Revealed World (2002); Women and Gender in Jewish Philosophy (2004); Judaism and the Phenomenon of Life: The Legacy of Hans Jonas (2008); Building Better Humans? Refocusing the Debate on Transhumanism (2011); Hollywood’s Chosen People: The Jewish Experience in American Cinema (2012); and Jewish Philosophy for the Twenty-First Century (2014). Professor Tirosh-Samuelson is the recipient of several large grants that have funded interdisciplinary research on religion, science, and technology. Aaron W. Hughes (Ph.D., Indiana University Bloomington, 2000) holds the Philip S. Bernstein Chair in Jewish Studies at the University of Rochester. Hughes was educated at the University of Alberta, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and Oxford University. He has taught at Miami University of Ohio, McMaster University, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, the University of Calgary, and the University at Buffalo. He is the author of over fifty articles and ten books, and the editor of seven books. His book titles include Abrahamic Religions: On the Uses and Abuses of History (Oxford, 2012); Muslim Identities (Columbia, 2013); The Study of Judaism: Identity, Authenticity, Scholarship (SUNY, 2013); and Rethinking Jewish Philosophy: Beyond Particularism and Universalism (Oxford, 2014). He is also the Editor-in-Chief of Method & Theory in the Study of Religion.

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

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.

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this context exegesis risks becoming eisegesis. Yet others 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 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: 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).

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Jewish philosophy—from antiquity to the present—always seems to have had and, for the most part continues to have, rather specific and 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., Henry Bergson, Edmund Husserl, and Carl Popper).

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.

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Whether in its medieval or modern guise, Jewish philosophy has a tendency to be less philosophical simply for the sake of rational analysis 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.   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.

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The institutional setting for the practice of Jewish philosophy has shaped Jewish philosophy as an academic discourse. But regardless of the setting, Jewish philosophy as an academic discourse is quite distinct from Jewish philosophy as constructive theology, even though the two may often by 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 the 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

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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

Jewish Philosophy, ed. Aaron. W. Hughes and Elliot R. Wolfson (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2010), 1–16.

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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 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, four seminal essays by the featured philosopher, an interview with him or her, and a select 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 long-lasting. 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 R. BLUMENTHAL: AN INTELLECTUAL PORTRAIT Hava Tirosh-Samuelson The life, career, and writings of David R. Blumenthal encapsulate the richness of American Jewish life in the second half of the twentieth century. As the son of a leading Conservative rabbi, Rabbi Aaron H. Blumenthal (1908–1982), David R. Blumenthal (b. 1938), who is also an ordained Conservative rabbi, exemplifies the main features of Conservative Judaism in America: the commitment to traditional Jewish observance, acknowledgment of Judaism’s historical evolution, commitment to the academic study of Judaism, loyalty to Zionism and the State of Israel, openness to egalitarianism, and engagement in Jewish-Christian dialogue in the post-­Holocaust era. These trends, however, do not exhaust Blumenthal’s intellectual legacy, since he is an exacting and innovative interpreter of medieval Jewish philosophy; an original, constructive theologian who offered a new post-Holocaust theology; a caring educator and politically involved public intellectual, who has used social psychology to demonstrate what needs to be done to prevent another Holocaust-like event; and above all “a religious Jew who takes seriously the presence of God and the truth of God’s promise to the Jewish people of seed, land, and blessing.”1 That statement and his own religious observance situate Blumenthal closer to Orthodoxy in the spectrum of contemporary American Judaism, although on many issues (e.g., the role of women), he is much more “liberal.”2 Indeed, no existing label in American Judaism fits Blumenthal perfectly, because he is an independent thinker who insists on the freedom to tell the truth as he sees it, even if the truth disrupts conventions and is difficult to accept.

1  David Blumenthal, “Beware of Your Beliefs,” in Anguished Hope: Holocaust Scholars Confront the Palestinian-Israeli Conflict, ed. Leonard Grob and John K. Roth (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 2008), 50–67, quote is on p. 50. Many of Blumenthal’s essays and book chapters are accessible electronically on his website, http://www.js.emory.edu/ BLUMENTHAL. 2 Blumenthal’s review of Michael Wyschograd, The Body of Faith: Judaism as Corporeal Election (New York, 1983) illustrates the point. See David Blumenthal, “Michael Wyschograd,” in Interpreters of Judaism in the Late Twentieth Century, ed. Steven Katz (Washington, DC: B’nai B’rith, 1993), 393–405.

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David Blumenthal has spent his adult life as an academic scholar teaching Jewish studies courses at elite academic institutions in the United States: the University of Minnesota, Brown University, and Emory University. Since 1981 he has held the Jay and Leslie Cohen Chair of Judaic Studies at Emory University, and in that capacity has contributed greatly to the growth of Jewish studies, the acceptance of Judaism within the discipline of religious studies, the flourishing of interreligious dialogue between Christians and Jews and (to a lesser degree) between Jews and Muslims, and the reframing of Judaism in light of the Holocaust and of post–World War II postmodernism and post-structuralism. His books, edited volumes, articles, translations, commentaries, book reviews, public addresses, and communications all exhibit a coherent outlook: to live as a Jew means to live in the constant presence of a personal God and express that relationship in all aspects of life, including human relations, devotional life, Torah study, education, social action, and politics. Blumenthal began his academic career as a historian of Judaism with a focus on the history of medieval Jewish philosophy, but in the 1980s moved away from history of ideas to constructive theology, articulating a personalist theology for the post-Holocaust era. Blumenthal’s message is theological not just because it talks about God, but because it calls for all people (and especially Jews) to live life with “God at the center,” to use the title of his first book of Jewish theology.3 The subtitle of this book, however, defines the project as “spirituality,” indicating that for Blumenthal theology is not an abstract academic discourse, but the “the process by which we learn things from life and bring those experiences and insights back into the accumulated traditions.”4 Put differently, theology manifests a dialectical relationship between theoretical reflections and lived experience: actual religious life lived within the bounds of the received tradition is the source of all theological reflection, and, in turn, theology frames and explicates the meaning of the lived experience. The theological process can be enriched by 3 David R. Blumenthal, God at the Center: Meditations on Jewish Spirituality (Northvale, NJ, and London: Jason Aronson, 1994). 4 David R. Blumenthal, “From Wissenschaft to Theology: A Mid-Life Re-Calling,” in Selving: Linking Work to Spirituality, ed. William Cleary (Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 2000), 102–12. (The essay is available on Blumenthal’s website and the pagination will follow the web version.) The essay is an important source of information about Blumenthal’s biography and intellectual development. Written as a first-person narrative, the essay demonstrates the methodology that informs his theological approach: theology has to be written as a personal narrative, because it reflects the personal encounter between the human self and the divine self. The more self-aware a theologian is, the more honest and truthful is the theology.

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philosophy, namely, the cognitive activity that enables us to make reasoned truth claims about the world. But philosophy remains the “handmaiden” of theology, precisely as the medieval philosophers understood it. The ultimate end of religious life is not a rational cognition of God’s existence, but the passionate love of God that transcends cognition and ratiocination. The role model for such understanding of religious life is no other than Moses Maimonides. Properly understood, Blumenthal has consistently argued, Maimonides is not the arch-rationalist, as most modern historians of Jewish philosophy made him to be, but rather an “intellectual mystic,” a thinker who insisted on the religious significance of the intellect, while positing a post-rational and post-intellectual mystical love of God as the ultimate spiritual end of human life. Although Blumenthal has previously distanced himself from Maimonides,5 it is not too far-fetched to claim that Blumenthal’s oeuvre is an argument for the feasibility of Maimonides’ intellectual mysticism even after the most horrific event of all, the Holocaust. “Living with God at the center” is Blumenthal’s way of spelling out how to attain intellectual mysticism today. Biography and Career David R. Blumenthal was born on December 28, 1938, in Houston, Texas, where his father, Rabbi Aaron H. Blumenthal, served as the spiritual leader of Temple Beth El (1937–1943).6 David is the oldest of four children of Aaron Blumenthal and Jane Spitzer, who were married in 1937. During World War II Rabbi Aaron Blumenthal served as an army chaplain (1943–1946), and after the war the family moved to Mt. Vernon, New York, where Rabbi Blumenthal assumed the leadership of Congregation Emanuel, a position he held until his retirement in 1973. The move to this Westchester suburb, just a few miles north of New York City, exemplified the process of suburbanization of American Jews in the post–World War II years, which undergirded the heyday of Conservative Judaism in America. Rabbi Blumenthal played a pivotal role in the growth of Conservative Judaism as President of the Rabbinic Assembly (1956–1958) and a 5 In God at the Center Blumenthal states: “I do not have much in common with Maimonides, who has occupied a great deal of my professional life, for he was a rigorous aggressive intellect and I have no abiding faith in the ultimate usefulness of the mind; it can be as crooked as the heart.” Blumenthal, God at the Center, xxvi. 6 For full biographical information on Aaron Blumenthal see Pamela Susan Nadell, Conservative Judaism in America: A Biographical Dictionary, 40–41.

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longtime member of the Rabbinical Assembly’s Committee on Jewish Law and Standards (1948–1982). A critic of the traditional stance of the Jewish Theological Seminary, Rabbi Blumenthal fought for the rights of minority opinions in Conservative jurisprudence and wrote the path-breaking responsum permitting women to have an aliyah (1955).7 He left his mark on Conservative Judaism through his legal rulings, speeches, and weekly columns for the Jewish Post and Opinion, a selection of which was edited by David Blumenthal.8 While following his father’s footsteps to some extent, David Blumenthal carved a different career path for himself.9 He earned a B.A. from the University of Pennsylvania (1961), after which he enrolled in the rabbinic program of the Jewish Theological Seminary, graduating with rabbinic ordination in 1964. A brief experience as a congregational rabbi (1964– 1968) confirmed that the rabbinate was not his life’s calling, leading him to enter graduate school at Columbia University (1968), graduating with a Ph.D. in Religion (1972). Whereas Aaron Blumenthal made his mark on American Judaism as a congregational rabbi and movement leader, David Blumenthal has made his mark as a scholar of Jewish studies, a teacher, and a public intellectual. In an interesting and perhaps ironic role reversal, whereas Rabbi Aaron Blumenthal “never talked about God or prayer,”10 David Blumenthal, the academic scholar, made theology his primary mode of self-expression. David Blumenthal’s academic career exemplified the larger trends in American academe as well as his own intellectual transformation. At the University of Pennsylvania he encountered the academic study of Judaism that emerged out of the nineteenth-century Wissenschaft des Judentums movement in Germany. By his own admission, he “fell for it hook, line and sinker.”11 Already as a freshman, Blumenthal took graduate courses with the leading Jewish biblical scholars, Ephraim A. Speiser, Yehezkel Kutscher, and Moses Greenberg, and the influential Jewish historian Solomon Dov

  7 The responsum was written in 1954 and published in 1955. See Aaron Blumenthal, “An Aliyah for Women,” Rabbinical Assembly Proceedings 29 (1955): 168–81.   8 See David R. Blumenthal, ed., And Bring Them Closer to Torah: The Life and Work of Rabbi Aaron Blumenthal (New York: Ktav, 1986). The selection includes several responsa on the status of women, including the path-breaking responsum mentioned in the previous note, indicating the centrality of the issue for Rabbi Blumenthal. Unfortunately, since Rabbi Blumenthal did not write down his sermons, none is included in this collection.   9 A full curriculum vitae of David R. Blumenthal is available on his website. 10 Blumenthal, “From Wissenschaft to Theology,” 2 (web version). 11  Ibid., 2 (web version).

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Goitein. These giants of the academic study of Judaism introduced him to the historical-philological approach to the Jewish past which differed from the learning he received in Jewish day school in Mt. Vernon. Despite the difference, there was no necessary conflict between these two approaches. Rather, the Jewish texts, many of which Blumenthal had learned by heart in the Ramaz Academy in New York, became the data for the academic analysis by historical-philological methods. Theologically, too, the young undergraduate did not think that academic method challenged his beliefs, since in those years he “became a Reconstructionist,” endorsing Mordecai Kaplan’s civilizational approach to Judaism.12 Kaplan’s reconstruction of Judaism as a civilization and the academic study of Judaism were two complementary aspects of the same intellectual project that enabled Blumenthal to be a tradition-bound Jew, a proud American, a loyal Zionist, and an academic in Jewish studies at the same time. As a committed Zionist, David spent his junior year in college in Israel (1958–1959) and encountered firsthand the economic, social, and cultural challenges that faced the nascent Jewish state. He would return to Israel once more as a graduate student (1962– 1963). His Zionist commitment has not wavered over the years, even when American Jewish intellectuals became increasingly critical of the policies of the Jewish state. The move from undergraduate studies at the University of Pennsylvania to the rabbinic program at the Jewish Theological Seminary (JTS) was a natural development in those days. In the 1960s and early 1970s, before the growth of Jewish studies programs in American universities, the Jewish Theological Seminary was the primary institution for training in the academic studies of Judaism. Indeed, most of the scholars who staffed the teaching positions of the newly established academic programs during the 1970s and 1980s received their training at JTS. Once again, Blumenthal benefited from outstanding academic training by the leading scholars of rabbinic Judaism, including Saul Lieberman, David Weiss-Halivni, and Max Kadushin. Surprisingly, he did not study with Abraham Joshua Heschel, the famous theologian on the faculty of JTS, although Blumenthal considers Heschel, “our revered teacher.”13 The person who introduced Blumenthal to the Jewish spiritual tradition was not Heschel but Rabbi Zalman 12 Ibid. (web version). Kaplan’s ideas, of course, were well known to Blumenthal, since his father was an avid follower of Kaplan’s reconstruction of Judaism. See Blumenthal, And Bring Them Closer to Torah, xv. 13 David R. Blumenthal, Facing the Abusing God: A Theology of Protest (Louisville, KY: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1993), 58.

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­Schachter-Shalomi, the influential Jewish New-Age thinker, who combined Hasidism with Eastern spirituality. The negotiation of the tensions between rationalist, academic scholarship and post-rationalist spirituality would become a persistent theme in the writings of David Blumenthal. Following his ordination at JTS, Blumenthal served for a brief time as the Rabbi of Beth Emeth Synagogue in Larchmont, New York. There he learned valuable pastoral skills and gained insight into the spiritual and practical difficulties of life in a contemporary Jewish community. During this period, he met and married his wife, Ursula Noether. Her family introduced him to the cultured world of German Jewry and to the life in the German Jewish refugee community. Together, Ursula and David began to build a family, a process that was to engage Blumenthal not only in the practical life of a husband and father but also in the organizational life of Jewish communities in Minneapolis, Providence, and Atlanta. Upon finishing his term as a congregational rabbi, Blumenthal returned to advanced study with the support of his family, enrolling in the graduate school of Columbia University, an institution that had close ties to JTS, both geographically and organizationally.14 As he describes it, the training at Columbia “was a great disappointment,” because “there was no real instruction in the history of religion.”15 Since he wanted to specialize in medieval Jewish philosophy, a topic not taught at Columbia at that time, he had to study the primary sources largely on his own by reading the texts in the original Hebrew, Arabic, or Judeo-Arabic, linguistic skills he already acquired at the University of Pennsylvania. Blumenthal’s graduate experience was salvaged by turning to Georges Vajda in Paris, a preeminent scholar of medieval Jewish philosophy, representing the academic study of Judaism tradition in France. The two years at the Sorbonne under Vajda’s supervision not only made him conversant in medieval metaphysics, physics, psychology, and ethics, but also exposed him to a distinctive interpretation of medieval Jewish and Muslim philosophy. In the early 1970s Vajda was quite alone in arguing that medieval Jewish philosophers were not rationalists, as modern philosophers (especially the Neo-Kantians) have understood the term, but rather spiritual teachers whose thought is best described as “intellectual mysticism” or “philosophical mysticism.”16 In the medieval, Judeo-Arabic 14 Besides the close proximity, a few blocks away from each other, the two institutions had joint degree programs for undergraduate and graduate students. 15 See Blumenthal, “From Wissenschaft to Theology,” 4 (web version). 16 This category was commonly used among historians of medieval Islamic philosophy in France, but it was less prevalent among historians of medieval Jewish philosophy in the

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milieu rational knowledge and mysticism were not diametrically opposed, but were rather different levels within a hierarchy of knowledge that culminated in the knowledge of God. Blumenthal proceeded to elaborate the thesis in regard to Moses Maimonides and his fifteenth-century Jewish follower in Yemen, Hoter ben Shlomo, the focus of Blumenthal’s doctoral dissertation.17 Analyzing the meaning and scope of “intellectual mysticism,” was Blumenthal’s main contribution to the history of Jewish philosophy, but the Jewish significance of intellectual mysticism transcended academic scholarship. When Blumenthal finished his graduate training in 1972, Jewish studies was beginning to take off in America as programs proliferated in public and private universities with the support of Jewish donors. Reflecting the growing economic prosperity of American Jews, on the one hand, and their growing ethnic pride (boosted by Israel’s victory in the 1967 Six-Day War), on the other hand, Jewish studies programs offered courses on “Judaism” to Jews and non-Jews alike. The flourishing of Jewish studies was further enhanced by the emergence of “area studies” in American higher education, a new interdisciplinary way of organizing accumulated knowledge outside the traditional disciplines (e.g., history, philosophy, sociology, political science, or literature) that expressed either the culture of ethnic minorities or viewpoints that had been previously excluded or marginalized. This was the context for the proliferation of new disciplines such as Black studies, Women’s studies, and Asian studies as well as religious studies. The latter field was most relevant to the growth of Jewish studies in the 1970s, because in the United States the constitutional separation between religion and state entailed that religion was taught only in denominational seminaries or divinity schools of private universities. It was only in the late 1960s, after the Supreme Court’s decision in the case of Abingdon School

United States or Israel. Georges Vajda and his students (e.g., David Blumenthal, Sara HellerWillensky, Roland Goetschel, and Paul Fenton) have been instrumental in introducing “intellectual mysticism” to Jewish historians. Blumenthal explains the history of the term in his “Maimonides’ Intellectualist Mysticism and the Superiority of Moses,” Studies in Medieval Culture 10 (1977): 51–68; reprinted in Approaches to the Study of Medieval Judaism, ed. David R. Blumenthal (Chico: Scholars Press, 1984), 27–52; and again in David R. Blumenthal, Philosophic Mysticism: Essays in Rational Religion (Ramat Gan: University of Bar Ilan Press, 2006), 73–95. 17 David R. Blumenthal, The Commentary of R. Hoter Ben Shlomo to the Thirteenth Principles of Maimonides (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1974) (= vol. 6 of Etudes sur le judaisme médiéval, ed. Georges Vajda). Further research on Hoter ben Shlomo was published in David R. Blumenthal, The Philosophic Questions and Answers of Hoter Ben Shlomo (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1981) (= vol. 11 of Etudes sur le judaisme médiéval, ed. Georges Vajda).

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District, PA v. Schempp, that religious studies departments were established in public universities. These new academic units offered comparative study of world religions, which were lumped under the general category of “religion,” to be examined sociologically, anthropologically, and conceptually. Blumenthal was at the very forefront of these academic trends and his academic career demonstrated the interface between Jewish studies, religious studies, women’s studies, and Black studies. Blumenthal’s academic career began at the University of Minnesota (1972–1973) where he was a Visiting Assistant Professor. He then became an Assistant Professor of Religion at Brown University (1973–1976), where Jacob Neusner, the most prolific and influential scholar of rabbinic Judaism, established a Jewish studies program that contributed greatly to the future of Jewish studies in America. In 1976 Blumenthal moved to Emory University, where he became an Associate Professor and holder of the Jay and Leslie Cohen Chair of Judaic Studies. In 1981 he was promoted to Full Professor, a position he still holds. Becoming a world renowned scholar, he has taught in other academic institutions in the United States, Europe, England, and Israel (e.g., Columbia University; Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes in Paris; the Gregorian Pontifical University in Rome; the Oxford Center for Post-Graduate Jewish Studies in Oxford, England; the Institute of Advanced Studies in the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in Israel; the CET Jewish Studies Program in Prague; Bar Ilan University in Ramat Gan, Israel; and the University of Leuven in Belgium). In addition to teaching and research, Blumenthal has been very active in several professional associations (e.g., the American Academy of Religion, the Association of Jewish Studies, the Medieval Academy of America) and has served on the editorial boards of several professional journals or book series (e.g., Association for Jewish Studies Review, Religious Studies Reviews, Etudes sur le judaisme médiéval, Brown Judaic Studies, Reviews in Religion and Theology, and Journal of Religion and Abuse). His contribution to Jewish studies, religious studies, and medieval studies has been formally recognized by making him a member of the European Academy of the Sciences (2003). His impact on contemporary Jewish life has been recognized by the Honorary Doctorate conferred on him by the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College (2013). During this long and stable academic career, Blumenthal’s work has been funded by many grants and awards from private foundations and public granting agencies, indicating the growing appeal of scholarship on Judaism in American society and culture. Emory University has been Blumenthal’s primary academic home, shaping his intellectual development, concerns, and style of writing. At Emory

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he encountered the faculty of Emory College and The Candler School of Theology (e.g., Jack Boozer, Fred Crawford, Eugene Bianchi, and William Beardslee), which influenced him in three major respects: First, the interaction with Christian theologians was the catalyst for his shift from the history of ideas to constructive theology. At Emory, Blumenthal became aware that “the Presbyterians took theology seriously,” and unlike Jews who were “instinctively political,” Christians were “instinctively theological.”18 Under the influence of his Christian colleagues, Blumenthal became more comfortable with theology as a mode of self-understanding and self-­expression. Second, the contact with Christian theologians brought him into the Jewish-Christian dialogue that flourished during the 1970s and 1980s in the wake of Vatican II (1962–1965). That revolutionary moment in Church history was largely a response to the atrocities of the Holocaust and the Christian awareness that the Church has to examine its responsibility for the anti-Semitism that made the Holocaust possible. In the 1980s the theological significance of the Holocaust for Jews and for Christians became the center of Blumenthal’s work. He immersed himself in Holocaust studies but moved the field forward by going beyond history and theology and paying special attention to psychology (first Freudian psychoanalysis and later social psychology), a field that other Jewish scholars of the Holocaust practically ignored. Third, he also began to engage academic feminism (especially the feminist critique of Western religions) and became familiar with and supportive of Jewish feminism. The openness to feminism and the deep interest in psychology would shape his approach to the victimization of the Jews in the Holocaust. Blumenthal became most active in several interreligious projects such as the Witness to the Holocaust Project at Emory University, the National Conference of Christians and Jews, the Task Team on Jewish-Christian Relations of the Presbyterian Church, and the Church Relations Committee of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. Blumenthal has also been active in Jewish-Muslim dialogue, but that interaction was much more frustrating and less fruitful.19 As a religious Jew he “was among the early speakers for Palestinian rights and [has] consistently supported the efforts of Israeli and Palestinian peace organizations.”20 Joining the religious peace group, Oz ve-Shalom, he hosted speakers from that group and related Israeli organizations, and, along with his Emory 18  Blumenthal, “From Wissenschaft to Theology,” 5–6 (web version). 19  Blumenthal’s involvement in Jewish-Muslim dialogue is discussed in his “Beware of Your Beliefs” cited in note 1 above. The references are to the pagination of the web version. 20 Ibid., 1 (web version).

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c­ olleagues, he “visited Palestinians in Israel and in the West Bank as well as Christians in Egypt.” After several years of intense work, however, he came to the conclusion that his attempts to advance the cause of peace and justice were “completely rejected” because the Palestinians were not interested in a dialogue and refused to accept co-responsibility to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The Palestinian interlocutors “candidly approved terrorism” and “have openly manifested a relentless wish to destroy the Jewish state and to drive out the Jews who have chosen to settle there.”21 Going beyond personal frustration, Blumenthal has attempted to move the conversation forward by applying the lessons he has learned in Jewish-Christian dialogue to the Israeli-Muslim conversation. He singled out “six beliefs about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that are not only widespread but also highly dangerous to Jewish survival” and has attempted to encounter them by explaining why Jews cannot accept these beliefs and risk their existence “in the post-Shoah period.”22 Out of these intense, interreligious, public discussions, Blumenthal developed his original and quite jarring “Theology of Protest,” that framed the response to the Holocaust in the intersection between religion and psychology. To understand the Holocaust we must understand the psychology of victims and victimizers and the complex response to abuse in particular. In the case of the Holocaust, the abusers of the Jews were not only the Nazis but no other than God Himself. In Facing the Abusing God: A Theology of Protest,23 Blumenthal proceeds to wrestle with the fact that the God of Israel is an “abusive God.” This provocative work was well reviewed by Christian theologians but practically ignored by Jewish scholars.24 It seems that both the literary style of the book—a blend of traditional Jewish commentary and postmodernist multivocality—and its radical content—the claim that “the holocaust is abuse, and there is no excuse for it,”25—were too difficult for Jewish readers to accept. Undeterred, Blumenthal continued to develop his distinctive post-Holocaust theology in The Banality of Good and Evil:

21  Ibid., 2 (web version). 22 Ibid., 6. 23 David R. Blumenthal, Facing the Abusing God: A Theology of Protest (Louisville, KY: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1993). 24 Blumenthal reflects on the lack of Jewish response in his “Confronting the Character of God: Text and Praxis,” in God in the Fray: A Tribute to Walter Brueggemann, ed. Tod Linafelt and Timothy K. Beal (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1998), 38–51. The essay is available on Blumenthal’s website. The relevant section is on p. 7 (web version). 25 Blumenthal, Facing the Abusing God, 263.

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Moral Lessons from the Shoah and Jewish Tradition,26 as well as in several important essays.27 What makes Blumenthal’s post-Holocaust theology so intriguing is the use of social psychology not only for the interpretation of the Holocaust as a theological event, but also as the source of moral education that will prevent a Holocaust-like event in the future. Contrary to Elie Wiesel and Emil Fackenheim, Blumenthal does not consider the Holocaust a mythic event that defies rational understanding. Rather, this seemingly most irrational event in human history can be understood rationally by the analytic tools of the social sciences, which, in turn, provide the proper practical response to the Holocaust: the deliberate cultivation of a pro-social personality type.28 Blumenthal’s detailed program of moral education, whose principles are listed as “commandments,”29 exemplifies the religious dimension of his moral education and his penchant to confront the dark side of persons, be they human or divine, in order to heal them. Blumenthal’s theology is meant to be therapeutic. Theology, then, must result in education and Blumenthal is a consummate teacher, whose outstanding teaching was formally recognized by Emory University, which honored him with the Distinguished Teacher Award (1988). Blumenthal introduced scores of Jewish and non-Jewish students to the literary treasures of the Jewish tradition, and encouraged them to develop their own interpretative skills and theological vision.30 Early on in his academic career he correctly grasped the challenge that confronted Jewish studies in America: if the discipline is to grow, the primary sources of Judaism should be translated into English in user friendly, affordable editions, even if these editions fall short of the exacting standards of Wissenschaft-type scholarship. Blumenthal published English translations 26 David R. Blumenthal, The Banality of Good and Evil: Moral Lessons from the Shoah and Jewish Tradition (Washington DC: Georgetown University Press, 1999). 27 For example, David R. Blumenthal, “Auschwitz and Hiroshima: Icons of Our Century,” in The Genocidal Temptation: Auschwitz, Hiroshima, Rwanda, and Beyond, ed. Robert S. Frey (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 2003), 241–56. 28 For example, David R. Blumenthal, “How Might Another Shoah Be Prevented?” Conservative Judaism 64, no. 4 (2013): 90–109, reprinted in this volume; David R. Blumenthal, “What to Do?: Approaches to Post-Holocaust Education,” in Humanity at the Limit, ed. Michael A. Signer (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000), 355–69. This essay is based on material presented in his The Banality of Good Evil. In the first decade or so of his work on these issues, Blumenthal used the term “Holocaust,” but in the late 1990s he began to refer to the event as “Shoah.” The reasons for the shift are discussed in Banality of Good and Evil, 13. For both terms, Blumenthal prefers not to capitalize these terms. 29 Blumenthal, Banality of Good and Evil, 138–39. 30 The commitment to education is evident on his website, which includes not only syllabi of courses but also the works of students.

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of kabbalistic texts to facilitate courses on the Jewish mystical tradition on American campuses,31 and encouraged students to enter a dialogue with rather obscure and intellectually challenging texts, ignoring the traditional self-imposed boundaries of these texts that reserved them to the initiated few. Because he believes that the ancient and medieval texts can and must be accessible to modern readers, he encouraged his students to encounter the texts directly, as he himself has done as a commentator and expositor. To encounter the traditional text (be it biblical, rabbinic, philosophic, kabbalistic, or liturgical) does not mean to offer a rationalistic account of its meaning; the encounter, instead, is experiential, perhaps even poetic, allowing the modern reader to make the past religious text personally meaningful and usable in the present. Reminiscent of Heschel’s poetic philosophy, Blumenthal’s theological reflections show a penchant for poetry (even to the point of writing his own liturgy), and his commentaries on biblical, rabbinic, and liturgical texts are imaginative and creative, although grounded in formal academic scholarship. To be a Jew, as Blumenthal understands it, is always to stand within the interpretative process of the received tradition. The process is necessarily subjective, reflecting one’s sociocultural position. He does not claim to articulate abstract truths, as philosophers tend to do, nor does he speak on behalf of the Jewish tradition. In agreement with feminist thinkers, he highlights his own positionality and states upfront that he engages the sacred texts as a white, heterosexual, married, middle-class Jewish male.32 Blumenthal has wholeheartedly accepted the methodology of academic feminism, and recommends it to his (mostly male) colleagues.33 Because he concedes the partiality of his own situated perspective, Blumenthal presents multiple perspectives and interpretations that do not settle a theoretical debate but rather invite the reader to enter the conversation. As much as that style is in accord with the multivocality of rabbinic texts, it also

31  David R. Blumenthal, Understanding Jewish Mysticism, 2 vols. (New York: Ktav, 1978). In the 1980s these two English-language anthologies were important resources for courses on Jewish mysticism in American universities. 32 Blumenthal’s self-characterization appears in various places in his writings. For example, Facing the Abusing God, 61, and The Banality of Good and Evil, 11. 33 The indebtedness to feminist scholarship is acknowledged, for example, in the following statement that explains how we need to approach past texts. In the context of talking about the interpretation of Maimonides, Blumenthal says the following: “An even better solution would be, following the feminist movement, to acknowledge our commitments upfront and then write and teach from them.” See Blumenthal, “Maimonides’ Philosophic Mysticism,” 8. The essay is reprinted in this volume.

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reflects the impact of postmodernism (especially Derrida’s ­deconstruction) on Blumenthal’s writing. The multiplicity of voices or perspectives does not result in chaos, since his worldview is governed by practices of Orthodox Judaism. As a man who is bound by the rituals of the Jewish tradition, it is very clear to Blumenthal how one needs to behave as a Jew and how one needs to position himself in the world. Within a tradition-governed life, Blumenthal reconciles being an American Jew and being loyal to Zionism and to the State of Israel; a deep pride in Judaism and genuine respect to the religious Other; a privileged outlook of a Jewish male and the awareness of women’s needs and demands; a deeply personal spirituality and the sharing of his spiritual life with his wife, Ursula, his children and his grandchildren, as well as with colleagues, students, and the general public. From History of Ideas to Constructive Theology As a historian of medieval Jewish philosophy David Blumenthal was trained to analyze ideas, explicate their meaning, trace their development over time, and understand their significance within the context of Jewish culture. In order to do this academic work, one has first to establish the primary texts through close philological and historical analysis that yields a critical edition of primary sources. This is what the academic study of Judaism entailed in the nineteenth century and most of the twentieth century, and which Blumenthal demonstrates in his scholarship on the Yemenite philosopher Hoter ben Shlomo (ca. 1400–1480). The choice of this thinker illustrates Blumenthal’s independent spirit: instead of focusing on Jewish philosophy in Spain, as most historians at the time did, he looked Eastward to the less-researched Jewish community in Yemen. By focusing on Hoter ben Shlomo (also known as Mansur ibn Sulayman alDhamari, or Mansur ibn Sulayman al-Ghamari), Blumenthal’s contribution to the history of Jewish philosophy was threefold. First, he showed that in the Islamic East, especially in Yemen, there was a very vibrant tradition of philosophical activity well into the fifteenth century and beyond, thereby debunking the notion that rationalist philosophy waned in the fifteenth century due to the increasing importance of Kabbalah. The category of “intellectual mysticism,” moreover, reconfigures the relationship between “philosophy” and “Kabbalah” and denies that the two are diametrically opposed. Second, in the Islamic East, Jewish philosophers remained loyal Maimonideans, but the character of his philosophy has to be properly understood within the larger intellectual context of “Jewish Ismailism,”

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namely, the Jewish adaptation of Ismaili doctrines (especially in regard to cosmology and psychology) as well as the Ismaili understanding of the phenomenon of prophecy and the consequent approach to sacred texts.34 Third, the best characterization of this intellectual tradition is “intellectual mysticism,” or “philosophic mysticism,” a particular blend of Neoplatonized Aristotelianism and Sufism. Hoter ben Shlomo, then, was not just an obscure thinker but a typical example of the dominant form of Jewish religiosity, or Jewish spirituality, that flourished in the Islamic East during the Middle Ages, especially in Egypt. The analysis of “intellectual mysticism” has been the primary contribution of Blumenthal to the history of Jewish philosophy. The term “intellectual mysticism” highlights the role of intellect in religious life, on the one hand, and the religious significance of intellectual perfection, on the other hand. In this worldview, religious life is “intellectual” because it is predicated on the acquisition of knowledge by means of human reason and it is “mystical” because the zenith of the process is “contact” or “conjunction” between the human intellect and the divine mind. In a series of studies, recently collected and republished under the title Philosophic Mysticism: Essays in Rational Religion,35 Blumenthal has illustrated this concept in regard to Maimonides and to Hoter ben Shlomo. The fact that Hoter was a loyal disciple of Maimonides indicates that this intellectual mysticism was not exceptional or aberrational in Judaism but rather an integral part of the normative tradition. Historians of medieval Jewish philosophy have written extensively on Maimonides, and Blumenthal engages the numerous studies, accepting, rejecting, or critiquing the various approaches as he explicates “the intellectual-mystical nature of Maimonides” by looking at his theories of prophecy (especially in regard to the prophecy of Moses and the revelatory experience at Sinai), providence, and piety. All three are cognitive phenomena because they “derive from the same source, the Agent Intelligence,” and all three “function by the same phenomenon, emanation,” the cosmological theory that dominated Neoplatonized-Aristotelianism in medieval ­Judeo-Arabic 34 Today the interplay of philosophy and mysticism in medieval Judeo-Muslim culture is taken for granted because of the pioneering research of Vajda and his students, first among them Blumenthal. For recent research on this intellectual tradition in medieval Islam see Michael Ebstein, Mysticism and Philosophy in al-Andalus (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2012). 35 The fact that Blumenthal chose to republish the material in 2006 signifies its continued significance notwithstanding his previous critique of Wissenschaft des Judentums or his own attempt to minimize the degree to which Maimonides is a role model for him.

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philosophy. Blumenthal rejects the notion that Maimonides had “one teaching for the masses and one for the elite”;36 rather, Maimonides “saw himself as the authoritative voice for all Israel in matters of law and belief” and addressed all Jews in variety of ways: Knowing his readership well, Maimonides wrote for each according to that person’s ability. For those interested only in knowledge of what to do, he wrote the Mishne Torah, the code of law. For those interested only in knowing what to believe, he wrote the Principles of Faith and the initial chapters of the Mishne Torah. For those concerned with the reasons behind the law, he wrote about that. For those concerned with the deeper complexities of the law, he left hints and guides in the Mishne Torah. For those perplexed about natural and metaphysical knowledge, he wrote about that in the Mishne Torah and, in greater depth, in the Guide. For those deeply schooled in Islamic science and philosophy, he wrote with greater subtlety, mostly in the Guide—not because of persecution, but because the subject matter and the audience required it.37

This approach to Maimonides denies the tension between the “esoteric” and the “exoteric” Maimonides, rejects the interpretation—made popular by Leo Strauss—that Maimonides’ philosophy (and in fact all philosophy) is a response to political persecution, and instead presents Maimonides above all as a teacher “who has a desire to educate everyone.” Maimonides, then, is the ultimate teacher and he taught all Jews (and not just the elite), communicating a unified message of “philosophic mysticism.” This is a spiritual path whose first phase is “the intellectual apprehension of God, also known as ‘love’ of God”;38 its second phase is “the intellectual contemplation of God,” also known as “intellectual worship of God . . . and as ‘passion’ for God”;39 and its third phase is “continuous contemplation of God . . . In such a state, the bliss or pleasure is not a fleeting moment in human spiritual life but an ongoing state of mystical consciousness, one that attends a person always.”40 The last stage of human intellectual development is post-rational, post-intellectual, and post-philosophic, and it is described by employing Sufi vocabulary. Analyzing Maimonides’ views in light of recent scholarship, Blumenthal makes a compelling case that Maimonides combined philosophy (i.e., the Neoplatonized Aristotelianism he inherited from his Muslim mentors 36 Blumenthal, “Maimonides’ Philosophic Mysticism,” 2 (web version). 37 Ibid. 38 Ibid., 3 (web version). 39 Ibid., 4 (web version). 40 Ibid., 6 (web version).

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Alfarabi and Avicenna) with Sufi mysticism, even though he was not a practicing Sufi.41 Blumenthal concludes that “for Maimonides, philosophy was the handmaiden of mysticism.”42 The work on Maimonides and his Yemenite follower, Hoter ben Shlomo, illustrates Blumenthal’s training as a historian of medieval philosophy, whose primary concern is to establish the correct reading of the sources. For the practitioners of Wissenschaft des Judentums, the recovery of the past “as it truly was,” to use Ranke’s famous phrase, was the task of historical scholarship; they did not feel a need to establish why or how past sources are relevant to Jewish life in the present and the future. For Blumenthal, by contrast, that was not enough; the recovery of past sources must be relevant to Jewish life in the present. A correct understanding of Maimonides, therefore, is not just an academic matter of concern to a small coterie of professionals, but to all Jews who see Maimonides as an authoritative teacher. If Maimonides is indeed a “philosophic mystic,” then Judaism is not simply about orthopraxis, nor is it solely about orthodoxy; rather Judaism is about “spirituality,” which in his essays on Maimonides Blumenthal equates with “philosophic mysticism.” (The term “spirituality” has a vaster meaning in other works.) This approach to Maimonides has vast implications: it means first that Jews today should be highly educated in the sciences (as Maimonides was) but that their scientific endeavor should lead them toward what Maimonides called “the intellectual love of God.” In this paradigm there is no conflict between “science” and “religion,” because the intellectual life (including academic scholarship) has a religious significance, and conversely, religious life, which is predicated on intellectual-scientific effort, culminates in spiritual, “post-intellectual” religious experience.43 If Maimonides is to be taken as a role model for contemporary Jews, and not just a historical fact, it is no wonder that Blumenthal found the philological-historical method of Wissenschaft des Judentums to be unsatisfactory or insufficient. He called on his fellow Jewish scholars to break away from their historicist predecessors, to adopt the concept of spirituality as a postintellectual category of analysis, and to make clear how their own personal faith shapes their approach to the past sources. By restoring “­intellectual 41  Ibid., 14 (web version). Since Blumenthal’s pioneering studies, there has been a lot of research on Jewish Sufis in medieval Islam and their impact on Jewish philosophy. See Paul Fenton, “Judaism and Sufism,” in The Cambridge Companion to Medieval Jewish Philosophy, ed. Daniel H. Frank and Oliver Leaman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 201–17. 42 Blumenthal, “Maimonides’ Philosophic Mysticism,” 15 (web version). 43 Blumenthal does not say so explicitly, but I think it is a reasonable and justified extrapolation on the basis of his work.

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mysticism” to its “rightful historical and spiritual place,”44 scholarship about medieval Jewish philosophy (whether it focuses on Maimonides or on Hoter ben Shlomo) can enrich Jewish practice in the present. If the core of all religious systems is “spiritual experience,” then scholars of Judaism should make that clear in their scholarship and in the way they live. But to do so, Jewish scholars have to focus not on critical edition of texts but on the experiential (i.e., spiritual) core of living faith, which consists of theology and devotional life, through prayer and rituals. Theology, or talking about God, does not come naturally to Jews, Blumenthal has observed. Even his own father, an influential rabbi, did not like to talk about God, although when he functioned as a cantor, one could see him actually communicating with God.45 Blumenthal’s interaction with Christian theologians shifted his understanding of theology, as we noted above, allowing him to regard theology as the prism through which all aspects of life are refracted. Theology is not just a systematic discourse on God’s attributes, theodicy, or providence, but also an ongoing reflection about everything we believe and do in the context of the living tradition. Theology is something we “do” when we interpret sacred texts, perform rituals, pray, study, and teach. In the Introduction to his Facing the Abusing God, Blumenthal offers a succinct and compelling description of theology. It cannot be quoted here in full but here are the topic sentences of this succinct and illuminating discussion: To be a theologian is to be on the boundary. To be a theologian is to be a voice for the tradition. To be a theologian is to accept a prior commitment to speak from out of the tradition and on behalf of some segment of it. To be a theologian is also to speak for God. It is to have a personal rapport with God. To be a theologian is to defend God. To be a theologian is also to speak for one’s fellow human beings. To be a theologian is to be in solidarity with one’s fellow human beings before God. To be a theologian is also to speak the “ought.” To “do theology” is to reflect and to share one’s thought about, and one’s experience of, God, tradition, community, and meaning.46 44 Blumenthal, “Philosophic Mysticism: The Ultimate Goal of Medieval Judaism,” in Esoteric and Exoteric Aspects in Judeo-Arabic Culture, ed. Benjamin Harry and Hagai BenShamai (Leiden: Brill, 2006), 1–18; reprinted in Blumenthal, Philosophic Mysticism: Essays in Rational Religion, 115–27. The essay is available on Blumenthal’s website and the quote is on p. 8 (web version). 45 Blumenthal, And Bring Them Closer to Torah, xx. 46 Blumenthal, Facing the Abusing God, 3–4 (emphasis in original).

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Blumenthal moved away from the history of ideas to adopt constructive theology as his primary mode of self-expression and the articulation of “the voice of the tradition.” But how can one speak in the name of the Jewish tradition in the second half of the twentieth century after the trauma of the Holocaust? After the Holocaust, as Susan Shapiro has argued, “one cannot simply speak,”47 because language itself has lost its meaning. If the Holocaust entails a “rupture,” “disruption,” “disconnection,” and “dissociation,” can a Jew still continue to believe in and worship the God of Israel? If the God of Israel was truly powerful, as traditional Jewish liturgy affirms, why did God allow the Holocaust to take place? And if God was impotent to stop the Holocaust, or too hidden to make Himself known in time of dire need, how can Jews continue to worship the traditional God of Jewish liturgy? If religion is predicated on a personal relationship with God, culminating in a mystical union, what kind of relationship is possible after the Holocaust? To be a Jewish theologian in the second half of the twentieth century meant to be a post-Holocaust theologian. Immersing himself in Holocaust studies, which flourished in the 1970s and 1980s, Blumenthal found other post-Holocaust theologies to be unsatisfactory because they did not address the real horror of the Holocaust. The God that allowed a Holocaust to happen is “an abusing God,” and the primary emotion that such a God elicits is anger. To honestly come to terms with the Holocaust requires one to admit that traditional theodicy does not work; a new theology is called for and Blumenthal went forth to articulate what he called “theology of protest” against the “abusing God.” Theology of Protest “Theology of protest” is not Blumenthal’s invention. In Judaism it has a long pedigree going back to the biblical Book of Job and to Abraham’s challenge to God who wanted to destroy all the inhabitants of Sodom and Gomorra. In the twentieth century, “theology of protest” was articulated mainly by African-American theologians who protested centuries of oppression, and by Latin-American Liberation theologians who protested on behalf of the voiceless poor. Blumenthal articulates a radical theology of protest that gives voice to the anger of the victims/survivors of the 47 Susan Shapiro, “Hearing the Testimony of Radical Negation,” Concilium 175 (1984): 3–10; “Failing Speech: Post-Holocaust Writing and the Discourse of Postmodernism,” Semeia 40 (1984): 65–91; cited in Facing the Abusing God, 8.

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worst form of abuse, the Holocaust. To understand the phenomenon of abuse, the complex relationship between victims and their victimizers, and the possibility of living with the emotional wounds of abuse, Blumenthal (and his colleagues at Emory) began to study many forms of abuse, especially the abuse of women and of children. What leads one (mostly men) to become abusive? How and why do women enter and remain in abusive relations? What does abuse do to children who are forced into it? How can victims of abuse (especially children) survive the horrific experience? What are the psychological mechanisms that bond victims and victimizers and how do the survivors of abuse manage to heal the wounds of abuse? The study of abuse was not theoretical but clinical and sociological, involving encounters with victims and survivors of abusive relations. On the basis of these emotionally wrenching learning experiences, Blumenthal framed his theology of protest against the abusing God. Facing the Abusing God is a book that “does theology,” that is, it is “theology in action,” so to speak. Instead of articulating a linear discourse of arguments about God, the book presents diverse perspectives, each representing different “universes of discourses,”48 that is, modalities of interpretation, which include aesthetic, moral, personal, and spiritual universes of discourse. The latter in particular challenges the “philosophic-rationalist mode of theology,” inviting us to see theology as the experiential, highly personal encounter between humans and God. In the Jewish tradition no other book expresses that personal encounter more deeply than the book of Psalms. Hence Blumenthal proceeds to do theology of protest by using the voices of four psalms—Ps. 128, Ps. 44, Ps. 109, and Ps. 27.49 The engagement is nonsystematic, dialogical, multivocal, and intertextual, imitating the style of traditional Jewish textual interpretation. Each Psalm is presented through six voices, two foundational voices and four commentaries on them: The first two include: (1) the received Hebrew texts; and (2) the English translations of the text. The four commentaries include: (1) philological commentary (called “Words”); (2) brief comments from the spiritual tradition of Hasidism (called “Sparks”); (3) the interpretation of the “emotional attitudes” of the Psalmist tradition (called “Affections”); and finally, (4) a response to various strands of postmodern culture that have challenged the “tradition of

48 Blumenthal, Facing the Abusing God, 33–43. 49 Ibid., 57–189.

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our reading of both the classical texts and the text of life.”50 This mode is called “Con-verses” and it attempts to “dis-close the closure, to present and perform plurisignificative readings of the texts.”51 Each of these commentaries is itself filled with ideas, references to other texts, observations, and insights. The commentary form, of course, is characteristic of the Jewish textual tradition. To make this clear, Blumenthal arranges the material in a manner reminiscent of the orthography of Jewish traditional texts: the core text is placed in the middle of the page and is surrounded by commentaries. The significance of this page design is twofold: First, Blumenthal positions his own rather radical approach to the Psalms within traditional Jewish textual interpretation. Second, Blumenthal teaches a general lesson about the interpretation of Jewish sacred texts: it is inherently intertextual so that the meaning of the sacred text emerges out of the conversation between the interpreter and previous (or even future) interpretations. This hermeneutical approach requires us to listen to diverse voices, each with its intonations, modulations, silences, logical gaps, emotional overtones, and unstated or barely heard undertones. To occupy the various universes of discourse of a given psalm requires one to listen to all of these voices, trying to keep them apart while seeing them in interaction with each other. In this process of attentive listening, meaning is never fixed, nor is it systematic. Rather, meaning changes constantly depending on the identity and ­location of the interpreter and the complex interaction with the various voices. This type of presentation does not make for easy reading, but it compels the reader to delve deep into the dynamics of the hermeneutical process. Blumenthal is not an author who lectures to the reader about the meaning of the psalm. Rather, he is more like a composer who creates and performs polyphonic music in which the various notes, musical phrases, and melodic lines literally interplay with each other. For that reason, I suspect, Blumenthal suggests that the book should be read “out loud”52 since only a performance of the Psalms and the commentaries on them can do justice to the powerful emotions expressed in them, especially anger and rage. Given the performative intent, it is also possible to view the encounter that the book seeks to evoke as a kind of theater, in which performers and the spectators undergo emotional experiences during the performance. But

50 Ibid., 60. 51  Ibid. 52 Ibid., 65.

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more than music or theater, what the book seems to imitate and recreate is the therapeutic situation in which healing takes place when difficult, painful emotions are expressed in the encounter between therapist and patient. In the therapeutic situation therapist and patient are bonded to each other in various forms of positive and negative emotions (best explained by Freudian psychoanalysis) out of which deep wounds can eventually heal. In the aftermath of the Holocaust, all Jews, and not only the survivors, are victims of abuse; all Jews have to come to terms with the fact that God is not a cozy presence in whose wings we find refuge from life’s tribulations; rather, God is a demanding Presence, a powerful, and even dark personality who places demands on his believers. To “do theology” means to speak with God very much as we do in therapy where “we can be angry with, accuse, repress, or even curse one’s father or mother,”53 but as much as we cannot deny our mother and father we cannot deny God’s existence. The Holocaust does not disconfirm God’s existence; it only exposes the truth about the God of Israel as depicted already in the Bible, and interpreted by feminists: “God is an abusing person” who “acts like an abusing male: husband, father, and lord.”54 The way to deal with God’s abusiveness, according to Blumenthal, is not to follow what other post-Holocaust theologians have proposed: we cannot blame human beings for being sinful, nor can we claim that abusiveness is not a “true” characteristic of God; similarly, we cannot explain the Holocaust by appealing to historical conditions, nor can we express our anger and rage against “the dark side of humanity” and at the same time “relinquish” it to God to deal with it.55 Blumenthal avers: Sixty years of experience with psychoanalysis and psychotherapy, fifty years of study of the holocaust, and a decade of contact with survivors of child abuse have surely taught us to take into account more fully the dark side of humanity. Anthropologically, ethical censorship of our view of humankind is false, and dangerous. Theologically, the ethical censorship of sacred texts and traditions deprives us of knowledge of a basic part of God’s personality. We cannot understand God (or ourselves) if we censor out what we do not like, or what we should like not to see . . . Rather, accept what you do not want to know and “with the tender strength that comes from an openness to your own deepest wounding,” turn to address God.56

53 Ibid., 238. 54 Ibid., 242. Blumenthal is most indebted to feminist biblical scholars (e.g., Gracia Fay Ellwood, Phyllis Trible, Mika Bal, Tikvah Frymer-Kensky) who exposed the domineering and abusive aspects of the biblical God. 55 Ibid., 245. 56 Ibid., 245–46.

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The theology of protest, then, is intended as a therapeutic process in which we not only express anger and rage about the abuse we were forced to sustain, but we do not deny the experience or the existence of those who abused us. To come to terms with the abusing God is analogous to coming to terms with an abusive father: you cannot deny the existence of the father or his abusive behavior. For the sake of your own mental wellbeing, you still have to face (i.e., relate to) the abusive father. In the post-Holocaust era, “protest is the religiously proper faith stance toward God.”57 If all Jews in the post-Holocaust era are essentially victims of the abusing God, all Jews should engage the process that allows victims of abuse to heal. Put differently, they should adopt the “psychotherapeutic mode of healing” to cope with the experience of abuse. That mode consists of the following elements: (1) avoid recreating the situation of abuse; (2) state the truth: “I am the victim, I am innocent, you are wrong”; (3) feel justified rage; (4) grieve for the loss of relatedness in the past, mourn the loss of relatedness in the present; and cry for the loss of relatedness in the future; (5) learn to accept and manage painful memories; (6) develop new concepts of partial love, partial power, partial resolution, intersubjectivity, and connectedness; and (7) empower oneself by acknowledging fully, “I have survived”; empower oneself by setting and accomplishing new realistic tasks and building confidence in one’s ability to cope. The process of healing is a confrontation with a real but terrifying past, set in the context of acquiring the skills necessary to deal with daily life as well as with that past. It is a slow and painful program of building a fragmented self.58

Blumenthal’s theology of protest is thus meant to heal deep wounds in the Jewish psyche so as to create space for the emergence of a healthier psyche and even a healthier relationship between victim and victimizer, between Israel and the God of Israel. Blumenthal does not consider the possibility that Jews could or should forsake the “abusing God” or refuse to have any relationship with Him. As far as Blumenthal is concerned, secularism is not a viable option open to Jews because Jewishness is essentially a religious identity. Facing the Abusing God offers a therapeutic program to Jews who continue to stand in a covenantal relationship with God, despite the fact that He is the perpetrator of abuse. But “How does one speak to God the

57 Ibid., 253. 58 Ibid., 257–58.

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Perpetrator? How does one address God the Abuser?” Blumenthal’s answer concludes the book: First we must make it clear to ourselves . . . that we have been the victims, the victims of abuse . . . Second, in our hurt and in our good common sense, we will distance ourselves from the Perpetrator . . . We will guard our distance— theologically and spiritually, in worship and in study. Third, we will point the finger, we will identify the Abuser, we will tell this ugly truth . . . Fourth we will empower ourselves by acknowledging fully our survival, by building human relationship, by participating in worthy causes, and by working and accomplishing our daily and social tasks. Fifth, we will not deny our own spirituality; rather, we will affirm it. We will affirm the miracle of healing and the wonder of life. We will affirm the grace of human contact and the sublimeness of the experience of the transcendent . . . Unity and reconciliation are no longer the goal; rather we seek a dialogue that affirms our difference and our justness, together with our relatedness to God.59

Thus summarized, the theology of protest is a dialectical process that moves between two poles: God and humanity. Facing the Abusing God focuses on coming to terms with God as Abuser. But what about humanity? The Holocaust happened because millions of people chose to collaborate with the Nazis. In a following study, The Banality of Good and Evil: Moral Lessons from the Shoah and Jewish Tradition,60 Blumenthal focuses on the human pole, understanding why people acted as they did and how human behavior could be changed. Facing Evil through Moral Education Hannah Arendt, of course, coined the phrase, “the banality of evil,”61 which garnered her the ire of close friends, colleagues, and critics.62 Without discussing the controversy, Blumenthal simply states that he finds the “banality of evil” to be “a very powerful analytic tool,”63 precisely because it resists making the evil of the Holocaust into a mythic event 59 Ibid., 267. 60 A précis of the book is available in David R. Blumenthal, “The Banality of Good and Evil: A Descriptive-Analytic and a Prescriptive-Normative Reflection,” in Good and Evil After Auschwitz: Ethical Implications for Today, ed. Jack Bemporad, et al. (Hoboken, NJ: Ktav Publishing, 2000), 285–99. 61  Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (New York: Penguin, 1963). 62 On the controversy surrounding Arendt’s book see Anson Rabinach, “The New York Intellectuals and the Hannah Arendt Controversy,” October 108 (2004): 97–111. 63 Blumenthal, Banality of Good and Evil, 5.

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or a ­metaphysical reality. According to Blumenthal, Arendt “meant to say that nazi evil was ‘banal’ both in being matter-of-fact and in being so because it rationalized evil as good.”64 The evil of the Holocaust was not perpetrated by monsters; rather, it was brought about by ordinary human beings who were socialized in a certain way and developed an antisocial personality under certain social and historical conditions that allowed for these antisocial tendencies to thrive. The antisocial personality type has certain characteristics, propensities, and attitudes that Blumenthal outlines in the opening of the book. They include: the tendency to have terrible temper tantrums; denigration of others’ self-righteousness; argumentativeness and a need to always come out triumphant; demand of absolute loyalty; desire to maintain authority and control by inciting family members against each other; seeing oneself as a victim; always correcting people; living without supportive love; and behaving authoritatively.65 This personality type is neither exceptional nor rare; rather it appears in all nations, ethnicities, and social groups, including the Jewish community. Since Jews too can exhibit this personality type, the opening (and quite startling) line of the book and also its first subheading is: “I knew a Jewish nazi.”66 The personality sketch is meant to say that the nazi personality type is not a demonic aberration but a set of characteristics that could reside even in a person who holds position of authority in respected social circles and who functions within accepted norms. Having recognized that evil was banal in the sense that the perpetrators were subject to ordinary socialization processes, Blumenthal noted that the rescuers, too, were subject to the same ordinary socialization processes. The perpetrators responded, “We did what we were told,” and the rescuers responded, “We were not heroes; we did what was expected of us.” This led Blumenthal to the startling discovery that the good is also banal, that is, that the doing of “heroic” deeds also results from the same socialization processes that sanction evil. In the very imaginative analysis rooted in the social sciences, Blumenthal compared obedience studies to altruistic studies and then compared evidence about the perpetrators and the rescuers during the Holocaust. In so doing, he found that several general socialization processes generate evil or 64 Ibid. 65 Ibid., 1–4. The characteristics are very much in accord with Erich Fromm’s analysis of the authoritarian personality in his Escape from Freedom (New York: Avon Book, 1969). 66 The word “nazi” is not capitalized to indicate that Blumenthal does not refer to a member of the National-Socialist German party but to a personality type.

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good, depending on how they are used. Thus, insertion into a social hierarchy that does, or tolerates, evil will evoke a response of obedience that leads to evil acts. And, conversely, insertion into a social hierarchy that does, or encourages, good will evoke a response of obedience that leads to good acts. Perpetrators fell into the first category and rescuers into the second. Thus, too, Blumenthal found that patterns of childhood discipline that are authoritarian and unfair create an antisocial personality that acts in an authoritarian and potentially evil way. Such persons tend to obey even evil demands. By contrast, patterns of childhood discipline that are respectful and fair create a prosocial personality that acts in inclusive and caring ways. Such persona tend to resist wrong demands and do good. As Blumenthal puts it: Legitimate social authority—hierarchical or peer authority—facilitates both antisocial and prosocial behavior. Legitimate social authority creates the agentic shift, thus allowing the individual to invoke authority to do either good or evil . . . . Patterns of antisocial childhood discipline, ranging from unnecessarily strict to outright abusive, create an authoritarian personality which will conform to the demands of authority and may even be drawn into a culture of cruelty. Patterns of prosocial childhood discipline, in which authority acts with the measured and reasoned behavior and allows itself to be challenged, create an altruistic personality which will question the demands of authority and is likely to be drawn into a culture of care.67

Comparison with perpetrators and survivors of other social disasters such as Vietnam and 9/11 lends further support to Blumenthal’s theses. Blumenthal’s analysis was quite unusual for someone whose main interest is theology. It was this theological interest that led him to try to write prescriptively about the doing of good and evil: What would one have to do to avoid creating an authoritarian personality capable of obeying to the point of doing evil? And, what would one have to do to create a prosocial personality capable of resisting evil and doing good? The answer, Blumenthal claims, lies in moral education; specifically it lies in using precisely the ordinary socialization processes, together with positive teaching of good, to train people to resist authority when it demands evil and to invoke authority when it demands good. The prosocial life is a combination of certain character traits, value concepts, social skills, and modes of behavior. The character traits include: 67 David R. Blumenthal, “Perpetrators and Rescuers: Two Key Factors,” in Remembering for the Future: The Holocaust in an Age of Genocide, ed. John K. Roth and Elizabeth Maxwell (Basingtoke: Palgrave, 2001), vol. 2, 223–24.

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commitment to intelligent moral judgment, intellectual perseverance, moral strength, righteous anger, moral courage, love, compassion, respect, honor, devotion, and friendship.68 Blumenthal explains each of these factors and show how they are linked to value concepts, namely concepts that fuse our “moral experience and our need to abstract and think about that experience.”69 The value concepts of the prosocial life include: morality, justice, caring, inclusiveness, extensivity, bonding, attachment, empathy, critical consciousness, empowerment, and protest. Referring to Max Kadushin, Blumenthal shows how these value concepts are encoded in the foundational concepts of the Jewish tradition—Tselem, Brit, Tsedek, and Hasidut/ Hesed—and how rabbinic Judaism itself provides the resources for prosocial training.70 Moral education should begin at an early age and should include formal instruction (e.g., teaching of prosocial value concepts, using the language of justice and caring, identifying and teaching prosocial texts and traditions, teaching the nature of social processes, and teaching critical thinking).71 The cultivation of the prosocial personality includes also teaching prosocial skills such as taking perspective and empathy; identifying and coding one’s feelings; identifying authorities, hierarchies, norms, roles, and social processes; externalizing repressed prosocial impulses; conflict management skills; networking; and protesting (or resistance).72 Inculcating these skills needs to be done by paying attention to content and process and by creating the institutional setting that is conducive to the practice of prosocial conduct. Moral education is precisely what Talmud Torah is all about, namely, the study and teaching of Torah. Blumenthal’s detailed program for the cultivation of prosocial life suggests that the trauma of the Holocaust need not result in despair, apathy, or inaction. Rather, this book and his other essays offer a practical, optimistic, psychologically attuned, honest, straightforward, empirically based, behavioristic and non-moralizing response. The Holocaust did not terminate Jewish life, which thrives not only in the Jewish State of Israel but also in the Diaspora, where Jews should collaborate with non-Jews (as Blumenthal has done) to create programs that address the social ills of the society so

68 Blumenthal, Banality of Good and Evil, 116–17. 69 Ibid., 117. The term “value concepts” was introduced as a category of analysis of rabbinic Judaism by Max Kadushin, Blumenthal’s teacher at JTS. 70 Ibid., 149–67. 71  Ibid., 132–39. 72 Ibid., 134–35.

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as to prevent the possibility of another Holocaust-like event.73 But even without anticipating another Shoah, the cultivation of the prosocial personality is most useful and relevant in all societies that witness child abuse, violence against women, and other atrocious forms of injustice. The practices, values, and life style of traditional Judaism in particular are the most appropriate antidote to persistent social problems. As a Jewish educator and a public intellectual, Blumenthal has made the Jewish tradition available to the public at large. The Holocaust, as Blumenthal put it, is “the most searing event of our century”;74 it is an iconic event of both oppressors and oppressed that functions as “a paradigm of human self-understanding.”75 By articulating a program for moral education, Blumenthal attempts to pave the way for human life in the post-Holocaust age. Jewish Spirituality Wrestling with the meaning of the Holocaust and the possibility for a personal relationship with God has not been an easy experience, but it has definitely enabled Blumenthal to deepen his Jewish faith. In his words, the result of writing of Facing the Abusing God was that: My faith is stronger for having faced God, spirituality, and the holocaust directly. Turning to God, face to Face, affirming God’s Presence even in the midst of great evil, was itself a spiritual event for me. Confronting God in the spirit of protesting on behalf of the Jewish people, as Levi Yitzhak did, was itself a reaffirmation that God is at the center.76

The final words of this quote echo the title of his book, God at the Center: Meditations on Jewish Spirituality, originally published in 1988, but republished with a few changes in 1994. The book presents Blumenthal’s “personalist theocentrism” but it does so deliberately in a non-systematic and non-propositional manner. As Blumenthal explains the purpose of the book and its methodology as follows:

73 David R. Blumenthal, “How Might Another Shoah Be Prevented,” Conservative Judaism 64, no. 4 (2013): 90–109. 74 Blumenthal, God in the Center, xiii. 75 Blumenthal, “Auschwitz and Hiroshima,” 7 (web edition). 76 Blumenthal, God at the Center: Meditations on Jewish Spirituality, 2nd ed. (Northvale NJ: Jason Aronson, 1994 [1988]), xiii.

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david r. blumenthal: an intellectual portrait The purpose of the book is to set forth a series of unsystematized insights into the nature of Jewish spirituality. They center around such motifs as the love of God, the fear of God, saintliness, sex, parenting, communal leadership, mystical experience, chosenness, knowledge of God and so on. They have as their core a way of seeing the world such that God and His holiness are at the core of our vision. These are meditations or reflections on life and sacred text as seen from within Jewish spirituality.77

The book “is not an entry in the ring of philosophical theology. Nor is it a formal explication of Jewish spirituality.”78 Instead of “sustained argument” the book presents “intuitive understandings” not just his own, but especially those of the Hasidic Rabbi Levi Yitzhak of Berditchev (1740– 1809). The teachings of the Hasidic master serve as an inspiration for Blumenthal’s own reflections/meditations that are quite far from the biblical text or from the words of the Hasidic master. The structure of the book is as follows: In each section, “A Torah text is presented together with a problem it contains. Then, a dvar Torah, a spiritual insight, to a Torah text, by the nineteenth-century Hasidic rabbi, Levi Yitzhak of Berditchev is given and explained. Finally, an application of Levi Yitzhak’s insight to modern living is presented.”79 While the book is not a collection of sermons, its mode of presentation is very homiletic in nature. The justification for this method is threefold: First, the book illustrates the intertextuality of the Jewish religious tradition and indeed of life itself: “life is the intertextuality of what we receive and who we, the receivers, are.” The “hermeneutics of retrieval is the art of reading the various texts of our culture and of our life anew.”80 Second, the book is an invitation to the reader to actively enter into the interpretative process by responding to the material presented in it. And third, the book is an (implicit) argument how “to do” Jewish theology. Theology is not a theory about God, but rather “the art of seeing the world from God’s point of view.”81 When we approach reality from the theological perspective, we sense God in nature, in our personal lives, and in our life as a society, and we acknowledge God’s influencing presence. Human awareness of God through the voices of others embodied in traditional texts is also central to the theological perspective. We read these texts and they echo in our hearts.

77 Ibid., xxxi. 78 Ibid., xxxii. 79 Ibid., xii. 80 Ibid., xvii. 81  Blumenthal, Banality of Good and Evil, 106.

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We listen to these other voices and they resonate in our minds and soul. This point of view is theocentric.82

Blumenthal’s theocentrism is personalist because God is first and foremost a person, or better still a personality. Like all persons God has character traits (both good and bad), emotions (both positive and negative), intentions (both explicit and implicit), and thoughts (both articulated and unarticulated). Personality (or personhood) resists reductive explanation; it can only be experienced through direct interaction. For Blumenthal that happens in the context of prayer. Prayer is the central framework for Jewish spirituality. In the context of prayer, Jews encounter God as a person and through prayer Jews communicate directly with God. From early in life Blumenthal felt the power of prayer by watching his own father pray in his public role as cantor. Blumenthal relates: “My father was a different person when he prayed. He was a child before God.”83 That experience remained with Blumenthal throughout his life. Like his father, it is in the context of prayer that Blumenthal experiences the relationship with God most deeply. With extreme honesty he describes the significance of prayer as follows: Over the years, however, and in spite of the doubt and puzzlement, the Presence has stuck with me. When I have been deeply angry over the fact that the path I chose was not completely my own, the Presence has drawn me to its bosom, quietly, in prayer. When I have studied the holocaust and been horrified, the Presence has embraced me in moments of quiet reflection. When I have despaired of achieving the purposes I owe the Presence, it has come and been with me, in quiet companionship. In a world that was, and is, ruthless, the Presence has been gentle, if insistent. Always the Presence has been available to me through a personal observance of the Jewish tradition. It has not come in the rough and tumble of professional life, nor in the confrontations of communal life, nor in the conflicts of family life, nor in the anguish of my own inner psychological life. Rather, it has come in the privacy of personal religious life and in spiritual moments of deep interpersonal encounter. As such, I have found the experience largely incommunicable . . . It is too personal; it is ineffable. I find this true.84

This description suggests that for Blumenthal prayer offers the ritual framework within which to experience God most intimately in a manner that transcends description. In this regard, Blumenthal’s own experience

82 Ibid. 83 See Blumenthal, And Bring Them Closer to Torah, xx. 84 Blumenthal, God at the Center, xxvii.

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is not so far apart from Maimonides’ post-intellectual, post-rationalist experience of God in prayer, although Maimonides rejects a personalist understanding of God.85 The centrality of prayer for religious practitioners has led Blumenthal to study it phenomenologically and psychologically, making use of and contributing to the discipline of ritual studies.86 To live with God at the center involves much more than the activity of prayer, since Jewish religious life consists as well of study, teaching, performance of prescribed rituals, celebration of holidays and festivals, Shabbat observance, life-cycle events, and the entire gamut of human social relations. All of these activities derive their significance and relevance from the relationship with God. A useful metaphor for living with God at the center is “a palace with many doors, each of which comes from the radiant central room.” This metaphor captures not only the structure of the book but the structure of Jewish religious life as practiced by Blumenthal in various concentric circles (family, Jewish community, and the larger American society). Thus the book invites the reader to enter the palace of the Jewish religious tradition and experience its deep wisdom articulated in diverse voices and through many different styles and genres. Judaism is a fabric woven from many threads that cannot be pulled apart and expressed in philosophic propositions, nor can its lyrical poetry be summarized in scholarly prose. Judaism is a full life that can only be lived and experienced by “doing theology.” The Chapters That Follow The four essays reprinted in this volume showcase the main areas of Blumenthal’s creativity. The first essay, “Personality,” presents the foundation of his personalist theocentrism, in which God is to be experienced as a

85 See David R. Blumenthal, “Maimonides: Prayer, Worship, Mysticism,” in Priere, Mystique et Judaise, ed. Roland Goetschel (Paris Presses Universitaires de France, 1987), 89–106; reprinted in Approaches to Judaism in Medieval Times, ed. David R. Blumenthal (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1988), 1–16; and in Philosophic Mysticism: Studies in Rational Religion, 96–114. 86 For example see David Blumenthal, “Praying Angry—A Jewish View,” which is Blumenthal’s response to Robert Orsi’s “Praying Angry,” posted in the online journal Reverberations: New Directions in the Study of Prayer. Orsi’s essay was posted on August 27, 2013 and Blumenthal’s response was posted October 24, 2013. The Social Science Research Council, which maintains the site of Reverberations, has authorized Blumenthal to develop a portal on “Jewish Prayer,” thereby formally recognizing his contribution to the discipline of ritual studies.

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person. Originally published as Chapter 2 of Facing the Abusing God,87 this essay explains the paradox of religious life: on the one hand, God is holy, namely, wholly other; but on the other hand, it is only if we approach God as a person, that we can relate to God. The essay explains the intersection of religion and psychology. While conceding that it is generally “not useful to engage Freud on the level of his metapsychology,” Blumenthal invite theologians to “probe their own metasystem utilizing all the modes of analysis available, including those of Freud.” He finds Freud most useful on the level of “methodological constructs,” since “we project our own parents into our understanding of God.” With these methodological tools he engages the texts of the Jewish tradition, the medium for the encounter between Israel and the God of Israel. Blumenthal singles out six personal characteristic of God: fairness; relatedness; powerful; loving; prone to anger; partisanship and explains how they manifest themselves in the Jewish theology. The second essay, “Liturgies of Anger,”88 illustrates Blumenthal’s understanding of the anger as a central emotion in human life and in divinehuman relations. Focusing on three “psalms of anger” (Pss. 109, 83, and 44), the essay exemplifies Blumenthal’s method of reading of the Psalms, and the centrality of prayer in his understanding of Jewish spirituality. To pray means “to be present to God,” and when we pray we bring “our anger to God . . . [and] confess our powerlessness, our inability to achieve justice and moral balance in the world; we submit the limitations of our power to God.” Although expressing human emotions, intents, and frustrations, this conception of prayer actually reinforces theocentrism. The third essay, “How Might Another Shoah Be Prevented,” introduces the reader to Blumenthal’s program of moral education and the original use he makes of contemporary social sciences. The essay makes clear that it is our responsibility to create the conditions for the cultivation of prosocial life, which will make another genocide less feasible. Based on his book, The Banality of Good and Evil, Blumenthal summarized the findings of Stanley Milgram, who “concluded that hierarchy and authority are inherent in any society and that hierarchy and authority are internalized and serve as the basis for obedience to legitimate authority.” He relates these studies to other “obedience experiments” and to the historical work of Christopher Browning that explained the mechanism that enabled “­ordinary men” to

87 Blumenthal, Facing the Abusing God, 11–22. 88 Originally published in Cross Currents 52, no. 2 (Summer 2002): 178–99.

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become “ ‘grass root’ killers” once they were inserted into the “hierarchy of army command.” Blumenthal juxtaposes these studies with experiments in social psychology that “reveal the power of authority and obedience to sanction prosocial behavior.” He applies these social-scientific findings to the challenge of post-Holocaust moral education as follows: “If we wish to prevent another shoah-like event, we must recognize that, willy nilly, we live in social hierarchies; that whether we like it or not, we are authorities within social hierarchies; and that, as such, it is our obligation to exercise our authority in a prosocial way.” The essay concludes with “five commandments for cultivating prosocial action”: “(1) teach the nature of the social processes”; “(2) Establish a means by which authority can be challenged”; “(3) Identify and teach prosocial skills”; “(4) Use the language of justice and caring”; and “(5) Do something.” The fourth and final essay, “Maimonides’ Philosophic Mysticism,” exemplifies his approach to Maimonides as a philosophic mystic and its significance for contemporary Jewish life. As analyzed above, the intellect is the vehicle that enables human beings to experience the love of God in a mystical moment that transcends intellectual knowledge. This understanding of Maimonides was common among Jewish philosophers in the Islamic East (especially in Egypt and Yemen) and it was also shared by kabbalists in the later middle ages, and by Hasidic rabbis in the early modern period. Thus the two major role models of Blumenthal—Moses Maimonides and Levi Yitzhak of Berditchev—have more in common than one might perceive. Both spiritual giants illustrate the dynamics of religious life that culminates in intimacy with God. Together these essays present David R. Blumenthal as a scholar, a teacher, and expositor of Judaism, and above all a religious Jew who courageously asserts the feasibility and desirability of Jewish religious life in the post-Holocaust era.

For Ursula It is my honor after forty-six years of marriage living and working together to dedicate this book to my wife, Ursula. As a young rabbi and then as a beginning academic, Ursula stood at my side. She cheerfully typed the three hundred pages of my thesis in medieval Judaeo-Arabic theology three times while, at the same time, giving shape to our ever gracious home and bringing our three sons into the world. Later, as my career and our life together developed, in New York, Providence, Atlanta, and abroad, Ursula turned our home into the hub of a wheel whose spokes went out to family, friends, faculty, students, and the classmates, parents, and friends of our children. Ursula did all this while, at the same time, caring for her parents and other elderly friends of the family with an attention remembered by all, raising our boys and maintaining our home on a daily basis, organizing concerts for young classical artists, and supporting initiatives at Emory. The Danzig Exhibit, the annual graduation parties, the David R. Blumenthal Award in Jewish Studies and the Humanities, the Hermann and Janet Noether Internships in Social Ethics and Community Service, and the Exhibit of Salvador Dali’s “Aliyah, the Rebirth of Israel” are just some of the many activities at Emory University that would not have taken place without Ursula’s initiative and support. I could not have navigated my life without Ursula’s love of life, her charm, her laughter, and her patience with me, even in difficult and painful moments and in times of deep disappointment. Throughout, she has remained faithfully by my side. I am grateful for her continued support. I dedicate this book to her with deep love and affection. I am my beloved’s and my beloved is mine. (Song of Songs 6:3) A man who does not have a wife dwells without happiness, without blessing, without goodness . . . and without peace. (Talmud, Yevamot 62b)

PERSONALITY1 David R. Blumenthal Personality as an Attribute of God Personality2 has many components: each person’s individual c­ haracter— for instance, whether one is intelligent, understanding, verbal, shy, or aggressive; each person’s sensitivities—for instance, whether one is musical, insightful, spiritual, or insensitive to suffering; each person’s individual history—for instance, whether one was loved well, neglected, traumatized, successful, or abused. There are more. Personality also includes the ability to make complex moral judgments, to define and to act upon right and wrong, good and evil, and all the shades in between. Moral judgment has a vocabulary and conceptuality of its own but it is an integral part of personality. Moral consciousness runs parallel to, and interacts in very complex ways with, each person’s individual character and history. God, as understood by the personalist stream of the tradition and experience, is personal. So God too must have a character, sensitivities, an individual history, and a moral capacity. These, together, identify God as a distinct person. The purpose of theology is to get to know this holy person, God. A substantial segment of the tradition, particularly the philosophical rationalist stream, teaches that no human language can be used of God, that all language about God is metaphoric or analogical. This claim has been strongly rejected, mostly on the grounds that Scripture and rabbinic literature does not use this abstract language. In its place the use of clearly anthropopathic language has been advocated.3 1  Facing the Abusing God: A Theology of Protest (Louisville, KY: Westminster/John Knox, 1993): Chapter 2. 2 I have chosen “personality” and not “personhood” because the latter sounds more abstract while the former, because of its connections with psychology, evokes the actual structures of human existence. 3 Cf., e.g., A. J. Heschel, The Prophets (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1962) vol. II; M. Kadushin, The Rabbinic Mind (New York: Jewish Theological Seminary, 1952): 194–324; D. Blumenthal, review of D. Klemm, Hermeneutical Inquiry and R. Chopp, The Praxis of Suffering, Religious Studies Review 15 (1989): 122–5; A. Green, “Rethinking Theology: Language, Experience, and Reality,” The Reconstructionist (Sept. 1988): 8–13; and idem.,

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The problem of describing God’s personality and building a theology upon it is complicated by the important social-psychological fact that a large number of theologians and clergypersons have read Freud or, more importantly, have undergone some form of psychotherapy or psychoanalysis. Those of us who have been through this know from deep personal knowledge that our understanding of God, particularly the personal aspect of God’s being, has been forcefully molded by our own personalities. We know that we have twisted God’s personality to fit our own, and we are wise enough to recognize that others have done, and continue to do, so. This raises the question of whether, or to what degree, one can speak of God in a personalist mode. It evokes the problem of transference distortion, which requires a few words. There is a difference between Freud’s metapsychology and his methodology. Freud’s metapsychology includes such powerful constructs as the Oedipal complex, ego-id-superego, and eros-thanatos. His methodology includes such potent analytic concepts as: transference, resistance, anxiety, countertransference, counterresistance, and counteranxiety. Considerable debate has gone into the relationship between these two areas of Freud’s enterprise: Are the various metapsychologies consistent? Must the therapeutic field include all of them? Can one use the methodological concepts without the metapsychological constructs?4 I share the following opinion: . . . In conducting therapy, well trained psychoanalysts of various metapsychologies continue to observe and define relatively similar processes and patterns of relatedness and communication . . . disagreements [among psychoanalysts] do not arise, strictly, from differing structures of empirical and systematic inquiry. They arise, rather, from conflicting philosophies about life, about which there is still room to differ among rational men [sic].5

I accept, then, the judgment that, practically, in the therapeutic situation, it is the analysis of phenomena using methodological concepts that is primary and that allows change while the metapsychological constructs provide supplementary, multi-dimensional structures of interpretive insight.

Seek My Face, Speak My Name (Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson, 1992)—reviewed by me in Modern Theology 9:2 (1993): 223–25. 4 Cf. B. Wolstein, Theory of Psychoanalytic Therapy (New York: Grune and Stratton, 1967). 5 Wolstein, 29, 41.

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For theology, this has two implications: First, it is generally not useful to engage Freud on the level of his metapsychology. Theology has its own metasystem and it is not clear that Freud’s metasystem is inherently any better, or worse, than that of traditional theology. Theologians need not claim Freud’s metapsychology as their own; they need only probe their own metasystem utilizing all the modes of analysis available, including those of Freud. For this reason, it can be enlightening to apply Freud’s metapsychology to certain religious narratives and rituals (e.g., the stories of the fall or the binding of Isaac, or the rituals of Kol Nidre or the Mass) because theologians learn something of the hidden dimensions of meaning in these acts. But this type of study does not lead very far and is, in any case, not a serious discussion of the basic insights of either metasystem.6 Second, it is very useful to engage Freud on the level of his methodological constructs. Such an encounter forces us to confront the way we project our own parents into our understanding of God. Put differently, God’s personality is portrayed by the tradition in its texts. Yet, we read God’s personality through the screen of our understanding of our own parents. This is our individual transferential distortion of the personalist God of the tradition. The task here, then, is to identify and reduce our own personal distortions of the personalist God portrayed in the sacred texts. This process is very difficult—indeed, it is impossible to separate completely our personal perceptions from our understanding of the tradition. But the task of identifying and reducing our transferential distortions is clear and it is useful because it yields a deeper personalist theology in which God can possess the most vibrant personality one can allow. It is also an ongoing process, not a one-time effort. To the task of reducing individual transferential distortions must be added the ongoing task of reducing social-historical distortions, i.e., those which are embedded in the formation and transmission of the tradition,7 as well as the contemporary-communal distortions, i.e., those which shape the meanings which a given contemporary community will accept.8 The goal of doing an “objective” theology becomes impossible in light of these 6 Cf. e.g., T. Reik, Ritual: Four Psychoanalytic Studies (New York: Grove Press, 1946); idem., Mystery on the Mountain (New York: Harper and Row, 1959); and C. Jung, Answer to Job (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1958). 7 Cf. the work of Gadamer and particularly that of the feminist interpreters (e.g., P. Trible, M. Bal) who have shown clearly that the tradition itself is subject to the cultural distortions of its creators, editors, and transmitters. 8 Three examples: Contemporary scholarship shows clearly the Christian reading of Jewish sources, and vice versa; it shows the occidental bias in reading texts; and it is almost exclusively formulated in the Enlightenment mode, which is not recognized as valid by

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tasks; indeed, only local theologies can be articulated, and they must be formulated with as much dignity, honesty, and integrity as possible. The responsibility of the theologian committed to the personalist stream of religious understanding, then, is to try to articulate a relationship with, and understanding of, God with the realization that no completely objective personalist theology can be written and that any personalist theology must be formulated with the conscious recognition of, and reduction of, the transferential, as well as the historical and the communal, distortions each person brings to the theological enterprise. Theology, then, is an exercise in intertextuality. Theology takes the texts of the tradition, as told and modified over the centuries, and reads them over against, and with, the texts of the life of the individual theologian, as that narrative takes shape under the influence of reflection and of the vicissitudes of life, always within the social and psychological contexts of the theologian. One’s knowledge of life, community, and tradition become deeper and more nuanced with age, and vary from person to person. Life is a never-ending narrative; so is one’s appreciation of the tradition. For this reason, the personality of God as disclosed by one thinker differs from that disclosed by another. Also, the God one comes to know as a teenager is not the same as the God one knows in mid-life. The intertextual approach to theology cannot yield an absolute truth, valid for all. It can only lead to partial coherence. Furthermore, the intertextual approach can only lead to partial integration, for we are never whole, nor are we ever at one with the tradition, which is too varied to be fully absorbed in one person. Jewish theology is a theology of fragments, of brokenness. It is an incomplete knowledge, as indeed one’s knowledge of oneself and of life is always incomplete. Fragmentedness does not, however, stop one from living, from acting, from enjoying, and from suffering. Nor does it stop one from worshiping, studying, wrestling with, and contemplating God. Six Personalist Attributes of God What, then, can a contemporary Jewish theology say about God’s personality, given a prior commitment to the personalist understanding of the

serious fundamentalist or spiritualist interpreters. One’s reading community is highly determinative of what one will accept as readable.

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tradition and of human experience, and bearing in mind humankind’s personal and communal distortions?9 First, God must be fair. In American English, the word “just” is too strong, for it conjures up the stereotype of a God of law who punishes severely, except insofar as God’s mercy overrules the strict requirement of the law. It conjures up, too, the person compulsively pursuing the letter of the law, ignoring the spirit thereof. The word “grace” is also too strong, for it evokes a God who has no standards of justice, who forgives all wrongdoing, thereby undermining God’s own teaching of justice. “Fairness” has just the right connotation in American English. God must act fairly, appropriately punishing the wicked, including ourselves, and appropriately rewarding the faithful, including our enemies. “Loving justice” or “just compassion” are also ways to express God’s fairness. In a theology that affirms God’s ongoing providence, God’s presence in all events, there is, however, the problem of acts of God which are not fair, which do not embody God’s just compassion: the suffering of the innocent and the just, natural and human disaster which strikes good and evil persons indiscriminately—child abuse, infant death, debilitating pain, shoah. This problem is not new and many answers, theodicies, have been proposed. The beginning of a “solution” to the problem of theodicy in personalist theology is to say that fairness implies dialogue; that there is a standard by which to judge and a means of accumulating credit and debit in all relations, even in our relationship with God and in God’s relationship with us. All humankind’s acts are debatable; all God’s judgments are arguable. Faithfulness, trust, and openness to dialogue are basic. Text, life, and moral dialogue are intertwined. The texts in the tradition supporting God’s fairness and the implied dialogue between humanity and God are numerous: Abraham arguing with God over the destruction of Sodom (Gen. 18), Job’s uncompromising defense of his innocence, Levi Yitzhak’s defense of the sinners of Israel.10 All these texts teach that God is bound by fairness and, hence, is committed to moral dialogue. Not that there is some external force inherent in nature   9 Personalist theology and human psychology remain wary of rigid hierarchies; personality is too flexible, in theory and practice, for such understandings. Hence, these six attributes of God are arranged in no particular hierarchic order. 10 On Levi Yitzhak, cf. S. Dresner, The World of a Hasidic Master (New York: Shapolsky, 1986) and D. Blumenthal, God at the Center (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1988). On the tradition of moral dialogue with God, cf. Anson Laytner, Arguing With God: A Jewish Tradition (Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson, 1990), reviewed by me in Modern Judaism 12:1 (Feb. 1992): 105–10.

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or being that compels God to be fair, for there is no force external to God in monotheistic thought; God, unlike God’s creatures, is totally autonomous. Rather, morality is an integral part of all personality. Hence, it is integral to the being of God and, then, to God’s creation. Second, God addresses, and can be addressed by, humankind. Although God is totally autonomous, God can be influenced. God can be angered or pleased by what humans do. In the words of the medieval thinkers, God is passible. Ultimately, this means that God can be induced by human words and behavior to change God’s mind, to reverse a decision, to alter a judgment. This insight is sometimes formulated as “the efficacy of prayer” or “original repentance.” God can, and did, also address humankind, for creation, majestic and beautiful though it is, does not have the power of judgment. It is natural, morally neutral. Hence, there is no “natural moral law.” For guidance, God addressed humankind, and God’s presence continues to draw humanity onto the path God wishes. Furthermore, God’s guidance causes humans anguish, joy, guilt, and satisfaction. Human beings, too, are passible. This communication, this mutual addressing of one another, is central to the dialogic nature of creation-revelation-piety. It constitutes the interrelatedness of humankind and God. It is the ground of the intertextuality of divine and human existence. Third, God is powerful but not perfect. God makes mistakes and admits it, as after the flood of Noah (Gen. 8:21–2). God lets Godself be seduced by Satan, as in the prologue of Job. God is unnecessarily short-tempered with the Jewish people, as Moses reminds God (Ex. 32:7–14; Num. 14:11–20). And, God repents (Gen. 6:6; Ex. 32:14; I Sam. 15:11, 35; II Sam. 24:16). Some argue that all such incidents are just acting, that they are a testing of humankind, but that does not seem to be the simpler meaning of the texts. Zoharic and Lurianic mysticism, too, seem to have left room for God’s imperfection.11 God, however, does have power. God’s power is absolute, but God cannot use it absolutely. For, having created a being also capable of moral judgment, God must limit God’s own power so as to empower the being God created. Humankind, too thus, has power, though not as much as God. Power is dialectical. It is the intertextuality of God’s and humankind’s expectations. Fourth, God is loving. There are many ways to love. There is virtuous love—ongoing, nurturing, morally rooted. There is erotic love—­passionate,

11 Cf. D. Blumenthal, Understanding Jewish Mysticism, vol. 1 (New York: Ktav Publishing, 1978): 101–184.

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searing, erratic. There is parental love—protective, demanding, guiding even in its anger. Sometimes love is unilateral; sometimes it is dialogic. Sometimes love is sacrificial; sometimes it is commanding, imperial. Sometimes love is open, articulated clearly; sometimes it is hidden, veiled. Love is an embrace—warm, comforting. A touch—alive, vibrant. A pounding heart—breathless, terrified. A glance deep into another’s eyes, into being beyond existence. The innocent embrace of a child. The gratitude of an elderly person not forgotten. Love is the affirmation of the other, given and received in wholeness. And forgiveness. Love is the presence of moral truth and goodness. Love is also the commitment to lead a life dedicated to truth and goodness. It is the stubborn perseverance on the way, no matter what the obstacle, the temptation, the sin. Love is not smooth. It wrenches, it drags one along, it demands. And love frustrates; it causes deep anger. How does one love one’s parent without superimposing that image on the child? How does one love one’s child who rebels forcefully? How does one love the dying other? Love is exclusive, dedicated to special persons in special ways. And love is inclusive, reaching from one to another, seeking to embrace the stranger. Love does not tolerate injustice; it impels one to action. Love forces one from security and lethargy into the world of the impersonal and evil. Love demands confrontation, risk, and danger; not foolhardiness but courage. Because it is many and varied, love is contradictory. Love is not monolithic. It cannot be rationalized into a coherent whole, into a system or a single theology. Love is much more complex than its metaphors. God loves all humanity, and individual human beings, in all these ways— as human beings love others and seek to be loved, in all these ways. Life moves; love leads, and follows. Human beings touch the text of God’s love and of human love. We enter it. We read it and ponder it. And it touches us, permeates us, puzzles and pains us, gives us life and demands death. Love, in all its complexity, makes us blossom and become that which we are destined to be. Even unilateral love is intertextual. Fifth, God gets angry. There is anger that is righteous indignation in the face of moral iniquity. This is God’s anger spoken by the prophets and the prophets’ anger spoken on behalf of God; an interface, an intertext. “Woe unto the pinnacle of the crown of the drunkards of Ephraim!” (Is. 28:1). “Shall one steal, kill, fornicate, swear falsely, make offerings to Baal, and follow other gods whom you do not even know; and then come and stand before Me, in this house upon which My name is called, and say ‘We are

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saved,’ only to go and do again those abominations?!” (Jer. 7:9–10). “You, are the man!” (II Sam. 12:7). The anger of righteous indignation is rooted in covenant and, because covenant is rooted in mutuality, when human beings feel righteous indignation toward God, they speak it to God, for the sake of the covenant.12 “Why do You ignore my soul, Lord? Why do You hide Your face from me? You have alienated lover and friend from me, my acquaintances are darkness” (Ps. 88:15, 19). “Have we forgotten the name of our God? Have we spread our hands in prayer to a foreign deity? God may probe this, for God knows the hidden things of the heart. In truth, we have been killed all day long because of You; we have been treated as sheep led to the slaughter. Awake! Why do You sleep, Lord?!” (Ps. 44:21–4). “Why do You forget us forever? Why do You desert us for days without end?” (Lam. 5:20). If there is a post-shoah Jewish theology, it is this theology of anger and protest, of righteous indignation, rooted in the intertext of the covenant, in mutual expectations and obligations.13 There is, however, also an anger that flows from bitterness, which springs from deep frustration and wells up from the recesses of the subconscious. God creates humankind and humanity turns rotten, “the instincts of the heart of humanity being evil from its earliest days” (Gen. 8:21). God brings the Jewish people out of Egypt with signs and wonders, and they rebel, building themselves a golden calf, murmuring against God and Moses, challenging Aaron, refusing the assault on the land and then leading one against God’s wishes. Moses knows they will sin again. And, later, they ask for a king—not realizing that they already have a King. Neither the rod of Babylon nor the scourge of Rome teach the lessons. God gets angry at God’s stiff-necked people and punishes them.14 The people do not understand. Their anger, too, springs from bitterness, from frustration, from the depths of the unconscious. They ask God’s vengeance upon their enemies. “Pour out Your wrath against the nations who 12 There is a general covenant with all humanity, through Adam and Noah, and a specific covenant with the Jewish people, through Sinai. Both are the ground for the appeal to God’s fairness. 13 Cf. D. Blumenthal, The Place of Faith and Grace in Judaism (Austin, TX: The Center for Judaic-Christian Studies, 1985) and idem., “Mercy,” Contemporary Jewish Religious Thought, edited by A. Cohen and P. Mendes-Flohr (New York: Scribners, 1987): 589–95. Cf. also E. Wiesel, The Trial of God (New York: Schocken Books, 1979) and A. Laytner, Arguing With God, 196ff. 14 Cf. H. Fisch, Poetry with a Purpose: Biblical Poetics and Interpretation (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988/1990)—reviewed by me in Midstream (August–September 1992): 41–3, 140–2, that God wrestles with God’s anger against Israel as it is undermined by God’s love.

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have not acknowledged You” (Ps. 79:6). “Happy is he who will grab your children and smash them on the rocks, Oh Babylon” (Ps. 137:9). Many, many rabbinic responsa from the shoah end with the angry imprecation, “May God avenge the blood of the innocent.” There is nothing wrong with these kinds of anger. If one loves passionately, zealously, one expects great things. God loves humanity and humanity loves God. The anger of righteous indignation has its place. So does the anger of bitterness and vengeance. There is, however, a particularly human kind of anger that does not apply to God. Human beings sometimes displace their anger, that is, they express anger at one person when they are really angry at something or someone else entirely. Tension in one’s work can sometimes spill over into anger against one’s children or spouse; or tension in a marriage can spill over into one’s workplace. This displaced anger, while natural to human beings, is not known to God. The texts do not speak of it and the unfairness of it mitigates against it being a part of the personality of God.15 Sixth, God chooses; God is partisan. No one likes to hear this, but God chooses and, having chosen, God jealously guards that which is God’s; and God demands loyalty from those whom God chooses. God chose to create the world. It is God’s possession; it belongs to God. For exactly that reason, no one may abuse it or lay absolute claim to it. God chose the Jewish people. They too, in their flesh, are God’s possession; they belong to God. For exactly that reason, no one may abuse them or lay claim to absolute authority over them. God chose the holy land. God resides in it. God’s people reside in it. The holy land, in its mountains and valleys, in its rocks and trees, is God’s possession; it belongs to God and to God’s people. For exactly that reason, no one may abuse the land or the people’s right to it. The people must respect God’s land because the land is theirs, from God. The election of the Jews was always a scandal, an incomprehensible thought. How could a universal God elect one people from among the myriads of creation? Non-Jews never understood and they have hated Jews because of the claim, especially Christians and Moslems who trace their own chosenness to the same God. Jews have differed in their r­eactions. Some have rejoiced in their specialness; others, particularly modern Jews, have been embarrassed by it. But, if God has personality, of course God

15 This is the basis for the argument in the Book of Job. I disagree with Jung (op. cit.) on this, though it is possible, indeed probable that, in a personalist-image theology, God’s personality includes a sub-conscious.

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has preferences. All persons have preferences for certain other people. Personality means having a character and a history, and character and history mean having preferences, being partial, partisan. One need not always act on one’s preferences. And, one must always carefully consider one’s preferences and the consequences of acting on them. But preference is core to personality. Therefore, the scandal of particularity is core to theology.16 There is no real reason for one’s preferences. It is chemistry, history, the template of the face, a look in the eye. It is biological, corporeal; it may be spiritual. It is blood. In real life, preference is balanced by culture, reason, and religion—it may not be used to justify a misuse of power—but preference itself is real, unreasoned. To be partisan is to be loyal and to demand loyalty. It is to accept the election and to remain faithful to the elector. It is to acknowledge that the one who chooses has a right to demand fidelity. Choosing creates a bond. Among humans, partiality is almost absolute; in God, preference is inalienable. Among humans, a marriage can end in divorce; not so, God’s marriage to humanity, in general and, more specifically, to the Jews. The Jews are God’s bride, God’s children, God’s bloodline. There is no escape, either for God or for the Jewish people. God does, and must, guard the Jews and the Jews do, and must, remain loyal to God. One may challenge certain acts of loyalty or protection; indeed, the blessing of moral judgment obligates one to this. One may question specific demands of the covenant; indeed, the blessing of mind obligates one to this. Revelation and creation empower, and make it one’s duty, to question, to challenge, and to disagree. One may even disown a demand or disclaim an act, but never the bond. Election and covenant demand faithfulness, even as the specifics are debatable. The joy of chosenness is the knowledge that one is special. It is the joy of the firstborn, the comfort of knowing one is elected, forever, absolutely. The pain of chosenness is the sureness of being hated by everyone else, the certainty of persecution at the hands of others independent of one’s behavior toward them. Nothing I can do will change my status; this is joy and burden.

16 Cf. M. Wyschogrod, The Body of Faith: Judaism as Corporeal Election (New York: Seabury, 1983), reviewed by me in AJS Review, 11:116–21; and D. Hartman, A Living Covenant (New York: Free Press, 1985), reviewed by me ibid., 12:298–305. One can even read the book of Genesis as an essay in chosenness and rejection.

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Meditative Postscript A suckling infant stares at its mother’s face; a senile person follows a face as it moves through the field of vision. Face is the first thing we see; it is also the last act of full recognition that we experience. Face is the basic template of personhood. Face is presence, and presence is face. The Face of God is God’s Presence; God’s Presence is present in God’s Face— which is why Face, and only Face, is capitalized. We seek the Face of God, we look for it, we search for it, we long for it: “As a deer yearns for a stream of water, so my inner being yearns for You, God. My innermost self thirsts for the living God; when shall I come and see / be seen by Your Face” (Ps. 42:2–3). We study God’s Face, we look at it, we ponder it, we question it: “Study the Lord and the Lord’s mightiness; seek God’s Face in all times and places” (Ps. 105:4). What kind of Face does God have? What does it communicate? What do we read when we read God’s Face, God’s Facial expression? We rejoice to see God’s Face; it is a light for us, it shines upon us and we are jubilant: “May the Lord cause the Lord’s Face to shine upon you, and may God be gracious unto you” (Num. 6:25). We also fear God’s Face, we flee God: “Where can I go away from Your spirit and where can I flee from Your Face” (Ps. 139:7). We hide our face from God: “Moses hid his face because he was afraid to look upon God” (Ex. 3:6). Jonah. God hides God’s Face from us and we are left existentially alone, isolated, without Presence. This undermines our presence, our orientedness; it constricts our face: “You hid Your Face; I was terrified” (Ps. 30:8; 104:29). And we yearn even more deeply to see God’s Face again, to be seen by God’s Face again, to return to God’s Presence: “My heart echoed You saying, ‘Seek My Face’; I do seek Your Face, Lord” (Ps. 27:8). A face, God’s Face, has many facets: anger, joy, shame, pain, light, severity, humor, doubt, kindness, waiting, expectation. There are as many facets to F/face as there are modes of relatedness. F/face has ten special expressions: inexpressibility, wisdom, understanding, grace, power, judgment, timelessness, beauty, fundamentality, and majesty (Zohar). F/face is the meeting point of the inner self and the outer world. F/face is the welling-forth of inexpressibility and inner depths into the stream of manifest consciousness. It is the majestic portal of expression of, and access to, grace,

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power, judgment, and beyond. F/face is the veil which renders the invisible visible. It is the gateway to the S/soul, the allusion to P/presence (Zohar).17 * But, what does one say when the F/face is cold, angry, forbidding? Where does one look when one is too intimidated to look upon the F/face? ‘God, Full of Compassion’18 ‘God, full of compassion’— Were it not for the God, full of compassion, there would be compassion in the world, and not just in Him. I, who picked flowers on the mountain and gazed into all the valleys, I, who carried corpses from the hills, know and tell that the world is empty of compassion. I, who was the king of salt by the side of the sea, who stood without decision by my window, who counted the steps of the angels, whose heart lifted weights of pain in terrible competitions, I, who use only a small portion of the words in the dictionary I, who am compelled against my will to solve riddles, know that, were it not for the ‘God, full of compassion,’ there would be compassion in the world, and not just in Him.

17 Cf. also Green, Seek My Face, 28–37. 18 A poem by the Israeli poet, Yehuda Amihai, taken from his collection, Shirim, 1948–62 (Jerusalem: Schocken Books, 1976): 69–70, my translation. The title and initial words are drawn from the liturgy for the dead and the second line involves a play on words that cannot be captured in English.

LITURGIES OF ANGER1 David R. Blumenthal Introduction Anger is a powerful wave. It roars over us and carries us away, first forward and then backward. In its surge we lose our balance and flounder. Anger is a storm, whipping through the air, raising dust, and pounding us with rain, bending that which is in its path to its will. Anger is red; it is blood. Sometimes it is red and black mixed together, joining evil and darkness. Anger distracts; it is a diversion from reality, an escape from what must be done. A fantasy that saps our energy and shames us, even to ourselves. Sometimes, anger brings clarity and sight, and sometimes it blinds us. In anger we see the truth, and we lose sight of the truth. Anger energizes us. It gets our blood going. It gives us the force to fight evil, to rebel against destiny. Anger gives us the intensity with which to create; it draws us out from the depths. Anger slides easily into rage, into fury. Rage and fury are magnified anger. They are more powerful waves, more intense energy, more vivid fantasy. They are more effective action, more violent storm. Rage and fury are white, hot, searing. Anger and rage are inseparably a part of us. One who has experienced no anger, no rage, is not human. Such a person has no deep investment in life, no love to protect, no vulnerability. Anger and rage are integral to human being. There is so much anger in the world. There is the personal anger we feel for someone who has taken advantage of us, who has cheated us, or abused us. There is the national anger we feel for those who have attacked our nation and endangered our people. There is the political anger we feel against those private and public institutions that have exploited us, or ignored or neglected us. And there is the anger we feel toward God Who has mistreated us or, in neglect, has allowed others to mistreat us.

1 Cross Currents (Summer 2002) 178–99.

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We spend a lot of time trying to deal with our anger. We repress it. We channel it. We sublimate it. We let it roll over us. We dream and fantasize about it. We feel ashamed of it, and we talk to friends and psychotherapists about it. But we do not pray it. We do not bring our anger to God, at least not enough. Christians in particular have a hard time bringing anger into their prayer life. However, as we look at the Book of Psalms, we see that anger is an integral part of the prayer life of the psalmist. Anger is a recurring theme—all kinds of anger: personal, national, political, and even anger toward God. In fact, the anger in the psalms is so strong that it often takes the form of rage. Rage expressed, not repressed. Rage prayed, not excluded from the divinehuman relationship. This is a mode of prayer that needs to be revitalized. The proper prayer life includes moments of deep anger, as well as times of tranquility and serenity. It includes moments of rage, as well as times of reflection and meditation; moments of sadness, as well as times of joy and praise; moments of depression, as well as times of gratitude and exultation; “To dwell in the house of the Lord forever” together with “For how long, oh Lord, for how long shall the wicked rejoice”; “Every breath shall praise God” together with “Oh God, make them as tumbleweed, as straw before the wind.” Psalms, precisely because they flow from the sheer variety of human life, contain the whole range of human emotions, feelings, and awarenesses—all of them brought before God, all of them incorporated into a full and vital prayer life. One simply alternates, bringing first this and then that feeling before God, turning first this and then that emotion into prayer.2 This essay is an attempt to resurface three psalms of anger for use in our time: one of personal anger, one of national anger, and one of anger against God. Each will be presented in translation and with commentary, and each will conclude with suggestions for how to pray the psalm. Note: A change in margin and/or spacing indicates a change in voice.

2 On the alternation of emotions in prayer, see my Facing the Abusing God: A Theology of Protest (Louisville, KY, Westminster/John Knox: 1993), chapter 5; my “Confronting the Character of God,” God in the Fray: A Tribute to Walter Brueggemann, ed. T. Linafelt and T. Beal (Minneapolis, Fortress Press: 1998) 38–51; and my “Theodicy: Dissonance in Theory and Praxis,” Concilium, 1:95–106 (appeared simultaneously also in Italian, German, French, and Spanish); both articles are also available on my website under Articles.

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A Psalm of Personal Anger Psalm 109 1 From the leader’s collection, by David; a psalm God Whom I praise, do not be silent. 2 For the mouths of the wicked and the deceitful have been opened against me; they speak to me with a lying tongue. 3 They encircle me with words of hate; they fight against me for no reason. 4 Instead of loving me, they detest me though I intercede for them. 5 They impose evil upon me in place of good, hate in place of my love. 6 Place a wicked person in command over him; let a persecutor stand at his right hand. 7 When he is tried, let him be convicted; let intercession for him fail. 8 May his days be few in number; may another take command of his life. 9 May his children be orphans; may his wife be a widow. 10 Let his children be continually on the move, begging; let them seek alms from within the decrepit buildings they inhabit. 11 Let the creditor ensnare all that is his; let aliens pillage that which he produces. 12 May no one advocate lovingkindness for him; may no one be merciful to his orphans. 13 May his end be to be cut off; may the family name be blotted out in the following generation.

6 Place a wicked person in command over her; let a persecutor stand at her right hand. 7 When she is tried, let her be convicted; let intercession for her fail. 8 May her days be few in number; may another take command of her life. 9 May her children be orphans; may her husband be a widower. 10 Let her children be continually on the move, begging; let them seek alms from within the decrepit buildings they inhabit. 11 Let the creditor ensnare all that is hers; let aliens pillage that which she produces. 12 May no one advocate lovingkindness for her; may no one be merciful to her orphans. 13 May her end be to be cut off; may the family name be blotted out in the following generation.

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14 Let the transgression of his fathers be remembered by the Lord; let the sin of his mother not be blotted out. 15 Let them be over against the Lord always; may God cut off their memory from the earth. 16 Because he did not remember to act in lovingkindness but persecuted the suffering poor to deal the death blow to the crushed in heart. 17 He continues to love cursing— then let it come upon him; He continues not to want blessing— then let it be far from him. 18 He wears cursing like a uniform; it penetrates his innards like water and his bones like rubbing oil.— 19 May it be for him like a habit in which he wraps himself, like a loincloth which is worn always. 20 This is the recompense from the Lord for those who detest me, for those who speak evil against my very being. 21 You, Lord, are my lord and master. Deal with me for the sake of Your Name. Because Your lovingkindness is good, save me. 22 For I am suffering and poor. My heart is hollow within me. 23 I am dragged out as a shadow is lengthened. I am tossed about like a locust. 24 My knees are weak from fasting. My flesh is thin from lack of fat. 25 I have become an object of derision for them. They see me and nod their heads. 26 Help me, Lord, my God. Save me by the standard of Your lovingkindness.

14 Let the transgression of her fathers be remembered by the Lord; let the sin of her mother not be blotted out. 15 Let them be over against the Lord always; may God cut off their memory from the earth. 16 Because she did not remember to act in lovingkindness but persecuted the suffering poor to deal the death blow to the crushed in heart. 17 She continues to love cursing— then let it come upon her; She continues not to want blessing— then let it be far from her. 18 She wears cursing like a uniform; it penetrates her innards like water and her bones like rubbing oil.— 19 May it be for her like a habit in which she wraps herself, like a loincloth which is worn always. 20 This is the recompense from the Lord for those who detest me, for those who speak evil against my very being.

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27 So that they know that such is Your hand; that You, Lord, have done it. 28 Let them curse—but You bless. Let them rise up and be ashamed— Your servant will rejoice. 29 Let those who detest me wear the garment of disgrace. Let them wrap their shame around them as a robe. 30 I will openly thank the Lord greatly. In the presence of multitudes, I will praise Him. 31 When He stands at the right hand of the suffering, to save him from those who pass judgment against his very being.

31 When He stands at the right hand of the suffering, to save her from those who pass judgment against her very being.

Commentary3 This is a psalm of rage against personal enemies. The psalmist does not mince words against such people. These are curses. Indeed, this is an “imprecatory psalm,” a psalm of curses. The commentators have trouble with this because it seems unfitting for the psalmist (King David, according to the superscription and Jewish tradition) to give vent to such violent aggressive feelings. Still, the text is what it is: an imprecatory psalm. The psalm is divided into three parts: the introductory accusations (vv. 1–5), the curses (vv. 6–20), and the prayers (vv. 21–31). Verses 1–5, the accusations, speak of people who are full of deceit and guile. Such people give evasive answers. They entrap those to whom they speak, using what is told to them against the speaker. Such people also lie outright. They distort the truth willingly, twisting words into untruth. Such people are filled with hate. They are vicious, ugly. Their words are meant to destroy, not to achieve any constructive goal. Such people meet love with betrayal, and repay trust with despising. “I am for peace but, when I speak, they are for war” (Ps. 120:7). Being the object of such outrageous duplicity evokes rage that, in turn, imposes its own distortions on the self, unwillingly drawing one into complementary hatred and violence. 3 For a full commentary on this psalm, one which reads both against and with the text, which brings spiritual subtexts, and which contains more philological detail, see Facing, chapter 9.

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Décalage. There is a gap between language and context. The first five verses, which set the stage, point toward a social or legal confrontation but the violence of the curses points elsewhere. Disconnected discourse suggests displacement, a transferring of deep anger from its true cause to some lesser source. A gap between language and context points toward a deeper context. When the punishment does not fit the crime, some more serious crime is alluded to. The intense language in this psalm shows that social power or legal fencing is not that which is at issue. What is at stake, here, is intimate combat, deeply personal attack and counter-attack. The disconnectedness of the discourse points to repressed rage. The vehemence, disproportionate to the context, alludes to a silenced crime. The language, here, bespeaks abuse—abuse by an intimate or intimates. To be abused means to be battered, to be beaten, to be assaulted bodily. To be abused means to have the boundary of the skin, the boundary that separates you from the other, violated. The victim’s suffering is senseless, without purpose or meaning; always it is undeserved. To be abused means to be tortured, systematically. To be abused is to have control of your body taken from you, by force. To be abused also means to be sexually assaulted, physically violated, raped. To be abused means to be bodily penetrated, to be forced open. To be abused is to have your sexuality ripped out of you, perhaps never to be yours again. To be abused always means to have things done to you against your will, and to be helpless to stop the violence to your person; it makes no difference whether you are male or female. Abuse comes from the outside; it is against your very person, your body, your mind, and your heart. To be abused means to be struck in anger, to be punished beyond the seriousness of the deed. To be abused means to be tied up, or shut in a dark closet, or burned with a cigarette, or whipped, or punished in the presence of others. To be abused means to be degraded, physically and in your inner being. To be abused is also to be threatened into the conspiracy of silence, to be choked until you learn to choke yourself. To be abused is not to tell, lest more violence be perpetrated on you or on others. To be abused is to live in (hidden) shame and deep fear; to live and not to trust, anyone. [Da capo al fine, reading ‘I,’ ‘me,’ and ‘my’ for ‘you’ and ‘your.’] Abuse can also be emotional, psychologically if not physically violent. To be emotionally abused means to be taken advantage of; to be so in need of affection that you agree to do things you know you shouldn’t have to do. It

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means to be so frightened that you allow things to be done to you that you know are invasive, violent, and wrong. Unjustified withholding of love, outbreaks of irrational anger, the colossal egocentrism of a parent that does not allow the child space to be, the demand for obedience which leaves no room for freedom . . . yelling, screaming, saying terrible things, personal insults . . . false sweet-talk, seduction . . . drinking, running away, drugs . . . slapping, hitting, smashing things . . . seducing the victim into the conspiracy of silence—all these are emotional abuse. Neglect, lack of love, denying achievements, unrealistic expectations, parentalization, judging the other all the time, breaking promises, smothering, comparing children, calling terrible names, the emotional undermining and terrorizing of others—all these are emotional abuse. Abuse by an intimate does not last a few days or even a year; it endures for a long time—a whole childhood, a whole marriage, a whole life. Its duration compounds its horror. Abuse by an intimate is not regular; it is intermittent, alternating with everyday life in an unpredictable pattern. Its capriciousness compounds its terror. Taking the natural love of a child for its parent, betraying that love by sexual, physical, or emotional abuse, and then telling the child that the abuse is “for your own good” is abuse compounded beyond all measure, for it takes the clear message of abuse and confuses it with love, it takes the clear lesson of deserved distrust and confounds it with traitorous trust. Teaching a child that abuse is “for its own good” fractures the natural bond between parent and child; it inverts the fifth commandment. There are many forms of abuse: physical, sexual, verbal, and emotional. This psalm is a psalm about abuse, about familiar combat, about life and death in the world of the intimate self. Verses 6–20 contain fourteen verses of curses. They call for a prosecutor/ persecutor to have control over the wicked person. Intercession and mitigating circumstances must fail to lighten the punishment. The personal memory of the wicked is to be erased, while it remains as a symbol of evil. Such a person is to be rewarded as he or she has lived: with evil. Even the widow(er) and orphans are not to be spared. There is to be no mercy for the abuser. Rage, cursing. How can a person get so angry—“rage” is the word? The normal human instinct is to flinch from the rage. The usual reflex is to deny it, to tone it down—even when reading it. But there it is, in the Psalms: rage. A religious affection, an emotional attitude, an approved feeling—and in a context of personal assault.

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Yes, there are mean people in the world—in one’s family, among one’s colleagues, among strangers—people driven by hatred, jealousy, greed, and fear; and yes, it is alright to feel vindictive, vengeful, reciprocally violent. But there is no sexually provocative sadism. No long drawn-out torturing of the victim, as was common in the dungeons and at public executions during the middle ages. Vindictiveness yes, but no gory detail. Vengeance yes, but no pornographic violence. Instead, there is the art of imprecation; the tailored, almost restrained, language of execration; the carefully considered malediction. Not the ladylike demur or gentlemanly protest, but the well-placed curse. A lost art in our day. A curse is performative speech, speaking is doing; it is not expressive language, verbal catharsis. To curse is to call down supernatural vengeance; it is not to vent one’s deepest feelings. To curse is to call down violence on the oppressor, to invoke abuse on the abuser. And yet, a curse is not performative action; it is not accomplishing one’s rage in social deed. The text acknowledges the power of the curse, but shies away from turning it into action—perhaps in modesty, perhaps for ethical reasons. Verses 21–31 contain the prayer, interspersed with moments of recurring rage and despair. Rage is an exhausting emotion. It drains the inner core of the self. It feeds itself, consumes the self, flares up, is snuffed out, flares up again, consumes again. Depression is rage-in-waiting, smoldering anger. The psalmist resolves this rage by putting the self in the context of God’s power. As one commentator to this psalm notes: “After he has cursed the wicked and all those who detest him, he returns to plead before God that he not be destroyed with those who vilify him because [he realizes that] he does not have the strength to resist them.” The psalmist accomplishes this in three dialectical steps, setting the goal for the reader at the same time. First, we do not conceal our continuing anger; we do not hide our rage or repress it; nor do we simply spew it forth from us. Rather, we always speak the truth of our pain, our hurt, and our anger. We bring our rage to God, we incorporate our rage into our prayer. Second, we recognize that all our rage, justified though it is, is powerless in itself to effect change in the real world. Rage alone does not right a wrong. We acknowledge that we are overwhelmed, helpless; that the working of justice does not ultimately come from us. We affirm the vision of true compassionate justice but we also admit that it is not we who effect it. We are the suffering poor.

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Third, we acknowledge God’s power and God’s justice, and we ask God to act for us. We pray that our cause, because it is just, be God’s cause, and that God’s cause be our cause; that God act against evil on behalf of our joint mission. We call upon God’s lovingkindness and God’s goodness because, through them, God will recognize and acknowledge us as the loyal servants we have been; and, we ask that this lovingkindness lead to action by God on our behalf. We place ourselves within God’s power, and then we petition for action on God’s part. We submit to God, and then we evoke God’s righteous rage on our behalf. Praying this Psalm Happy are you if you do not know what this psalm is about. But most people have a real personal enemy, someone who genuinely hates them, someone who truly makes life miserable and unbearable for them. There are those who even have someone who has ruined them for life, crippling them emotionally through one of the many forms of abuse. Who is your worst enemy? Visualize him or her, invoke the Presence of God, and pray this psalm. A Psalm of National Anger Psalm 83 1 A psalm of Asaf 2 God, do not You be silent! Do not be still! Do not be quiet, God! 3 Indeed, Your enemies roar. Those who hate You have lifted up their heads. 4 They connive in secret against Your people. They take counsel against Your treasure. 5 They say, “Let us go and wipe them out from being a nation so that the name of Israel never be mentioned again.” 6 Indeed they have put their hearts together. They have cut a covenant even against You.— 7 The tents of Syrians and the Saudis, Yemenis and Iranians, 8 Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and al-Qaeda, the Palestinian Authority and the dwellers of Lebanon. 9 The Iraqis too have joined them; they are the arm of the sons of Lot. Selah.

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10 Do to them as You did to Midian, and to Sisera and Yavin at the stream of Kishon. 11 They were destroyed at Ein Dor. They were dung for the land. 12 Make their leaders as ’Orev and Ze’ev. all their chiefs as Zevah and Tsalmuna’. 13 For they have said, “We shall inherit for ourselves the gardens of God.” 14 Oh, God make them as tumbleweed! as straw blown before the wind! 15 As fire burns a forest, as flames cause a mountainside to blaze, 16 so should You pursue them in Your windstorm and confound them in Your tempest! 17 Fill their faces with humiliation so that they seek Your Name, Lord! 18 Let them be ashamed and confounded forever! And let them be disgraced and destroyed! 19 So that they know that You, Your Name, Lord, are alone, far above all creation.

Commentary 4 This is a psalm of national rage. There are enemies, and they are real. They threaten destruction, indeed genocide. The psalmist does not mince words here either. This is a prayer for the destruction of one’s national enemies. Prayer is serious business; it is not speech. To speak is to express, to externalize a thought or feeling. Prayer is performative speech; it is talking that intends action. A prayer for vengeance is, therefore, not just an externalized emotion; it is speech moving toward power. As such, a prayer for vengeance is ethically permissible; it is real prayer, one we fervently hope God will fulfill. Serious prayer, however, is not serious action. One may pray “take now my life” (Jonah 4:3) but one may not commit suicide. One may pray that God kill one’s enemies, as in this psalm, but one may not commit murder.5

4 For a fuller liturgical context for this psalm, see my “ ‘Make Them as Tumbleweed,’” Strike Terror No More: Theological Ethics and the New War (St. Louis, MO, Chalice Press: 2002) 130–37. 5 In Jewish tradition, one may, indeed one must, act in self-defense. One may even kill to prevent the killing of another, but one may not murder. On this, see M. Broyde, “Battlefield Ethics in the Jewish Tradition,” Proceedings of the 95th Annual Meeting of the American Society of International Law (2001) 92–98 and the literature cited there.

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Prayer, then, is more than speech and less than action. The psalm is serious prayer but it is not a call to action. The psalm is divided into two parts, separated by the word “Selah”: the first describes the situation of enemies that surround the people and plot openly their total annihilation (vv. 1–9); the second is the psalmist’s prayer that God thoroughly defeat them, politically and morally (vv. 10–19). Verses 5 and 13 define the nature of the enemy. They are not ethnic entities. Nor are they nations. Nor are they a religion, or a political group. Rather, they are nations, ethnic entities, and religious or political groups that espouse genocide. They are those who want to “wipe out from being a nation,” who intend that “the name of Israel never be mentioned again,” who wish “to inherit for ourselves the garden of God.” The enemy are those who preach hatred and violence in their public forums and glorify those who sacrifice their lives to embody that teaching. They are those who advocate terror and make heroes of those who practice it. They acknowledge no justification at all for the existence of Israel. They oppose coexistence and do not want peace. Teaching, practicing, and glorifying mass murder make one an enemy. Verses 7–9 name the enemies. I have substituted modern names for the traditional text which, written in biblical times, reads as follows: “The tents of Edom and the Ishmaelites, Moab and the Hagarites. Geval, Amon, and Amalek; Philistia and the residents of Tyre. Assyria, too, has joined them; they are the arm of the sons of Lot. Selah.” Hagarites is a synonym for Ishmaelites. The nations of Geval, Amon, and Amalek occupied what is now Jordan. Philistia was located in what is now the Gaza Strip though it covered more territory to the north. Tyre is still in Lebanon. Assyria was northwest of what is now Iraq. The modern names give the sense of contemporary reality rather than that of ancient history. Verses 10–12 invoke God’s action in history. Here, I have left the biblical names of the defeated foes precisely in order to invoke history and the covenant with God that governs history. Midian is soundly defeated by Gideon (Judges 7–8). Yavin, king of Hazor, and his general, Sisera, are soundly defeated by Deborah, Barak, and Yael (Judges 5–6). The battle of Ein Dor is not directly recorded in connection with the war against Yavin and Sisera, but Ein Dor is close to Ta’anakh (Joshua 17:11) which is the location of the crucial battle in Deborah’s war. ’Orev and Ze’ev are Midianite commanders killed in the battle (Judges 7:25). Zevah and Tsalmuna’ are Midianite kings killed in battle (Judges 8:12–21). The sons of Lot, by incestuous relationship with his daughters, were Moab and Amon (Gen. 19: 29–38). The historical references, thus, are quite real and serve as a powerful precedent for invoking God’s protection.

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Verses 14–19 are part of the psalmist’s prayer but I have set them apart with a space because they can apply to any enemy in any time. The metaphors are very powerful: tumbleweed, straw in the wind, and a raging forest fire. The proper punishment is also strong: humiliation, shame, confounding, and disgrace, followed by destruction. The ultimate purpose, however, is not revenge but the acknowledgement of God’s sovereignty over all God’s creation. (The “they” in the last verse may refer to the destroyed enemies, or to the surviving enemies and bystanders.) Praying this Psalm Happy are you if you do not know what this psalm, too, is about. But we, as a people, do have enemies. And they do hate us. And they do really want to annihilate us. They do say, “Let us go and wipe them out from being a nation so that the name of Israel/America never be mentioned again.” In the face of such hatred, love is not the answer. There is a time for love and understanding, but war is not one of those times. There is a time for reason and negotiation, but an environment of incitement and ongoing terror is not one of those times, even if the enemy dresses terror in national liberation. Rather, we must pray for the sound and thorough defeat of our enemies. We ask God to annihilate them, if there is no other choice—and sometimes there isn’t. A Psalm of Anger Against God Psalm 44 1 From the leader’s collection, by the Korah family; for contemplation. 2 God, with our own ears we heard, our ancestors told us how You did mighty deeds in their days, in days of old. 3 You, with Your power, disinherited nations; then You settled our ancestors; You acted against nations, sending them forth. 4 Truly, our ancestors did not inherit the land with their sword, nor did their arm save them; it was Your right hand, Your arm, and the light of Your Face for You were pleased with them. 5 You are my king, God, command the victory of Jacob. 6 With You, we will gore our enemies; with Your Name, we will trample our foes.

liturgies of anger 7 Truly, I do not put trust in my bow, nor will my sword give me victory. 8 Truly, You have saved us too from our enemies; You have also disgraced those who hated us. 9 Through God we praise all day, we give thanks to Your Name forever. Selah. 10 But now, You desert and shame us. You do not go out with our armies. 11 You put us to flight from our enemies. Those who hate us tear us to pieces at will. 12 You hand us over like sheep to be devoured. You cast us among the nations. 13 You sell Your people for nothing. You do not make a profit on their sale price. 14 You make us an object of shame for our neighbors, a thing of scorn and derision for those around us. 15 You make an example of us to the nations, an object of head-shaking among the peoples. 16 All day, my humiliation confronts me, my shame covers me, 17 from the sounds of the taunter and the blasphemer, from the fantasy of revenge on the enemy. 18 All this happened to us yet we did not forget You, nor did we betray Your covenant. 19 Our hearts did not retreat, nor did our steps deviate from Your way. 20 Though You crushed us into a desolate place and covered us with deep darkness, 21 did we forget the Name of our God or spread our hands in prayer to a strange deity? 22 Let God Himself investigate this for He knows the hidden recesses of the heart. 23 Truly, for Your sake we are killed all day long, we are considered sheep to be butchered. 24 Wake up! Why do You sleep, Lord?! Arise! Do not abandon forever! 25 Why do You hide Your Face? Why do You forget our persecution and our oppression? 26 For our souls have been pounded into the dirt, our stomachs are stuck to the ground. 27 Get up! Help us! Redeem us for the sake of Your gracious love.

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Commentary6 This psalm is a psalm of rage against God. Our generation reads this psalm in the shadow of the shoah. It is not a survivor’s psalm, but a victim’s psalm; and we identify with the victims. It expresses our rage—for them, for their suffering, for our own suffering through them. We rage at our enemies. We rage at those who betrayed us, by action and by inaction. And we rage at God. Otherwise, we have not confronted the shoah. The psalm is divided into five parts: recalling of God’s miraculous acts in the distant past (vv. 1–4), remembering of God’s saving deeds in the lifetime of the psalmist (vv. 5–9), confession of shame at the current defeat of the people (vv. 10–17), strong protest of innocence (vv. 18–23), and an angry cryprayer for immediate help (vv. 24–27). Verses 1–9 are set as a prayer before battle. The people and their leaders gather to pray for victory, invoking God’s historical help and pledging their humble loyalty to God. Verses 5 and 6 invoke God’s defending power in strong words. War is not tea with crumpets. War is goring one’s enemies, as an ox gores another ox or a person. Life is fierce loyalty to one’s family and people. Life is also watching out for, and actively combatting, those who would do you in. Life is sometimes a jungle. Hatred and jealousy, not love, often motivate life. In such moments, why should one forgive one’s enemy? Especially if he or she has done nothing to indicate any feeling of genuine remorse? Better to be wary, to return hostility. Sibling jealousy, fear of death, economic envy, racial prejudice—these do not go away. Better to know and acknowledge one’s enemies, to be ready to gore them. Décalage. Between verses 9 and 10 the battle takes place and the people suffer terrible losses. Verses 10–17 turn to the immediate defeat of the people and their degradation at the hands of their enemies. The psalmist does not mince words but speaks forcefully, with powerful images, and in short, choppy sentences. The following midrash catches the shoah context well. (Winter, 1944): “You desert and shame us”—as they cut our beards and mass-rape our women. “You do not go out with our armies”—with our resistance. “You put us to flight from our enemies”—in mass exodus and transports.

6 For a full commentary on this psalm, one which reads both against and with the text, which brings spiritual subtexts, and which contains more philological detail, see Facing, chapter 8.

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“Those who hate us tear us to pieces at will”—using our skins for lampshades and our flesh for soap. “You hand us over like sheep to be devoured”—in the gas chambers, crematoria, and mass burning-pits. “You cast us among the nations”—as stateless and displaced persons. “You sell Your people for nothing”—we are worth less than slaves, less than animals. “You do not make a profit on their sale price”—our value is precisely calculated for work, starvation, and death. “You make us an object of shame for our neighbors”—so that no one touches us, in the camps and even after liberation. “A thing of scorn and derision for those around us”—they toss scraps of bread into the trains of our starving people; they make us defecate in our clothing. “You make an example of us to the nations”—of degradation and dehumanization, a sign par excellence, a symbol of Jew-hatred. “An object of head-shaking among the peoples”—in disbelief that something like this is happening to anyone, much less to us, Your chosen people.

Verses 18–23 are the people’s protest to God. In full consciousness of the degradation of the people, the psalmist turns on their behalf to God. He angrily asserts their innocence and affirms their undeviating loyalty with rhetorical questions and statements. This is the core of his defense of the people which is, at one and the same time, a prosecutorial argument against / with God. The following quotation from Elie Wiesel captures well the juxtaposition to verse 23, “truly, we are considered sheep to be butchered.” Never shall I forget that night, the first night in the camp, which has turned my life into one long night, seven times cursed and seven times sealed. Never shall I forget the little faces of the children, whose bodies I saw turned into wreaths of smoke beneath a silent blue sky. Never shall I forget those flames which consumed my faith forever. Never shall I forget that nocturnal silence which deprived me, for all eternity, of the desire to live. Never shall I forget those moments which murdered my God and my soul and turned my dreams to dust. Never shall I forget these things, even if I am condemned to live as long as God Himself. Never.7

Verses 24–27 are the people’s cry-prayer for help. In his deepest anguish, the psalmist commands God. It is an act of protest, of accusation. No

7 Elie Wiesel, Night, 32.

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q­ uarter is given. Nothing is swept away in false piety, in aesthetic imagery, or in elegant theological speculation. The language is very strong: We are being slaughtered like sheep; God must save us! God is asleep; God must wake up! God cannot hide from our suffering! God is like a drunken soldier Who must be roused from God’s stupor to avenge God’s people (Ps. 78:65). The Hebrew verbs here are in the imperative form. The language is so strong that the levites who chanted this psalm in the temple were called “the arousers” and the rabbis actually suppressed the daily recitation of this psalm. The emotion of this psalm is rage. It is hurt and anger, magnified. Yet this rage is morally transformed into a religious affection, into the ongoing emotional attitude of righteous anger. It is not enough to feel rage; it must be channeled into a demand for fairness, into a cry for justice. The transformation of rage into righteous anger is a function of the theology of covenant. God’s proclaimed love for us and God’s announced commitment to protect and be fair to us bind God to moral behavior towards us. The covenant holds God in its scope. The rage of disgraceful defeat, then, can be transformed by the covenant into a moral demand. The humiliation of suffering, then, can be transformed through the covenant into a moral claim. As God is a jealous God demanding loyalty from us in covenant, so we, in our searing humiliation, demand. We transform our anger, through the covenant, into our moral claim against God. As God is angry with us in covenant, so we are angry with God in covenant. We experience a true anger, which becomes a true moral claim, rooted in our mutual covenantal debt. Finally, the affection of moral righteousness is a proclamation of love of God, of concern for God’s honor and God’s people. Hurt becomes a moral demand, which is really a defense of the Beloved. Anger becomes a moral claim, which is really an expression of love. Praying this Psalm To pray this psalm is to take your life in your hands.8 It is a terrifying psalm and an even more terrifying prayer. One cannot use it often, but there are moments when rage against God is the only appropriate response. So says

8 For my own reaction to praying this psalm, see “What I Believe,” Commentary (August 1996) 23–24; “Theodicy: Dissonance in Theory and Praxis”; and “Make Them as Tumbleweed”; all available on my website.

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the psalmist. And one must have the faith and the courage to pray it—not for oneself, but for one’s people, for history, indeed for God Godself. At Yom Hashoah services, have a reader read the selection from Wiesel out loud. Then, continue reading the Wiesel selection in a low voice while another person reads this psalm with the full range of fury that is in it. Concluding Theological Fragments Prayer is serious business; it is not just mumbling the liturgy, or group singing, or individual meditation on the source of all tranquility. Prayer is living in the Presence of the divine, in grace and in rage. It is being present to God, for better and for worse. Hurt, anger, and rage are normal parts of life and, hence, must be normal parts of our prayer life. We, therefore, always speak the truth of our hurt, pain, anger, and even our rage to God. We never hide or repress the truth of our anguish. In bringing our anger to God, we also always confess our powerlessness, our inability to achieve justice and moral balance in the world; we submit the limitations of our power to God. And, at the same time, we call upon God to assume power where we cannot exercise it. We pray to God to rectify the wrong done to us, to impose justice, morality, and righteousness. In our powerlessness, we invoke God’s covenant with us and we call God to action. This includes the sound and thorough defeat of our personal and national enemies. There is nothing wrong in this; covenant implies loyalty on both sides. Covenant means justice for both parties. When we are hurt and abused, God, too, has been hurt and abused and, when God’s kingship is denied, we are the first victims. Righteous anger defends covenant. The sound and thorough defeat of the enemy are part of covenantal relatedness—precisely because it is not pornographic violence that is the goal but action that seeks justice for both parties to the covenant. Acknowledging the sovereignty of God in all of God’s creation, including personal and national history, is the goal. Vengeance is sometimes the only way to do that.9

9 In much of English usage “vengeance,” perhaps under the influence of Christian tradition, has a negative connotation; it is seen an unbounded violence. I do not think this is correct. The term I use for that is “pornographic violence.” Rather, “vengeance” is violent action that is, nonetheless, retribution for a previous violent action. What makes “vengeance” ethically acceptable is that it is still proportionate to the previous violence perpetrated—‘the punishment still fits the crime’—which is not true in “pornographic

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As I noted above, prayer is serious business but prayer is not speech. To speak is to express, to externalize a thought or feeling. Prayer is p ­ erformative speech; it is talking that intends action. A curse or a prayer for vengeance is, therefore, not just an externalized emotion; it is speech moving toward power. As such, a curse or prayer for vengeance is ethically permissible; it is real prayer, one we fervently hope God will fulfill. Serious prayer, however, is not serious action. One may pray “take now my life” (Jonah 4:3) but one may not commit suicide. One may pray that God kill one’s enemy but one may not commit murder.10 Prayer, then, is more than speech and less than action. The Talmud recognized this distinction clearly and records the following difference of opinion (Talmud, Berakhot 10a): There were certain hoodlums in the neighborhood of Rabbi Me’ir who were bothering him greatly. So, Rabbi Me’ir prayed that God should have mercy on them so that they die. His wife, Beruria, said to him, “On what verse do you rely [that you pray for the death of these hoodlums]? If it is based on the verse ‘May hatta’im be ended on earth’ [Ps. 104:35], it does not say hot’im [sinners] but hata’im [sins]. Furthermore, look at the end of the verse, ‘and the wicked will be no more.’ [From this we learn that] when sins have ended, the wicked will be no more. Pray, therefore, that God have mercy on them that they do repentance.” He prayed for them to do repentance, and they repented.11

On the other hand, the Silent Devotion recited three times daily as part of the Siddur (prayerbook) contains the following prayer: Let there be no hope for the traitors. Let all evil be wiped out in a moment. Let all Your enemies speedily be cut off. May You uproot, smash, grind down, and subdue the evil ones, quickly, in our days. Blessed are You, Lord, Who smashes enemies and subdues the evil ones.

The tension between these two attitudes toward the wicked, located as they are in the most classical of rabbinic Jewish sources, is meant as a guide: we are to do both—to pray for the utter destruction of the wicked and to pray for their repentance. We cannot do one exclusively. We cannot pray only for the sound and thorough defeat of our enemies, nor can

violence.” As noted below, “vengeance” does not resolve wickedness but, by restoring moral balance, it is a natural and necessary step toward reconciliation. 10 See above, note 5. 11  Actually, Beruria has misread the grammar of the verse. Hatta’im means sinners and not sins, it being a professional noun form. The Talmud ignores this grammatical error and takes the lesson for its moral meaning.

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we pray only for their repentance. We must do both. To be sure, we cannot do both at once. So we must alternate. At some times, we must pray for the utter destruction of evil people and, at other times, we must pray that God grant them insight, wisdom, and courage to see and to do that which is just and moral. As the tension between wickedness and wicked people exists in our prayers, so it exists in our behavior in the real world. There are times when we must have the wisdom, insight, and courage to fight, even to kill. But there are also times when we must have the wisdom, insight, and courage to negotiate. We must alternate between making peace and making war.12 * I do not want to be angry—not at my personal adversaries, not at my national enemies, and certainly not at my God. I would rather concentrate on the positive dimensions of life, or at least be left alone to do what I do best. But life and history will not let me alone. I do have adversaries and enemies, and the God Who is active in my personal and national life sometimes acts against me/us. When that happens, I know that submission is not really an option. When bad things happen to good people, I know that acceptance is only half the answer. The other half is acknowledging anger and rage—learning to think them, to feel them, and even to pray them. That is what the angry psalms are for. That is what the liturgy of anger is for. To help us bring our anger and rage to God, even if it is God we are angry at. If we succeed, we pray our anger and our protest, though we cannot stay on that path for too long because we will get lost spiritually. There comes a moment when we must bracket that rage, and consciously turn, difficult though it may be, to the psalms of love and praise and to the liturgy of peace and devotion. And, there comes a moment when, hard though it may be, we must turn to confront wickedness. In that moment, we must bracket love and praise and, difficult though it may be, we must consciously turn to the liturgy of anger and protest. Life weaves back and forth between anger and love, between war and peace; we all know that. Just so does the prayer life weave back and forth between anger and peace, between protest and devotion.

12 On alternating paths as a way of life, see Facing, chapter 5.

HOW MIGHT ANOTHER SHOAH BE PREVENTED?1 David R. Blumenthal Introduction One of the issues to come up very early in the existence of the United States Holocaust Memorial Council2 was the tension between the historical and the moral missions of the Council and, then, the Museum. On the one hand, we all wanted the story of the shoah3 to be told with as much detail as possible. The truth of what happened is awful but it must be told, and it must be told accurately and fully. The Museum has succeeded beyond our wildest dreams in fulfilling this mission. On the other hand, what good is history if it does not lead to change? What good is a museum for the shoah if it does not lead to some action to prevent further holocausts, genocides, and mass killings? Already at the beginning, there were some who wanted the last room on the museum tour to be a memorial room with appropriate décor and a place for meditation. Others felt that the last room should be a place for social action with brochures for various causes and an exhortation to choose a cause and do something. Eventually, the last room became The Hall of Remembrance but we also set up

1 Conservative Judaism 64:4 (Summer 2013) 90–109. An abbreviated version of this talk was delivered at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in October 2008 as the Joseph and Rebecca Meyerhoff Annual Lecture. I am indebted to the USHMM for permission to print this. Another version of it was delivered at the Kristallnacht Commemoration in Toronto, Canada, on November 9, 2009. 2 I have been associated with this great enterprise since 1982 when Elie Wiesel asked me to be one of the Special Advisors to the Chairman of the United States Holocaust Memorial Council. 3 For many years I used the word “holocaust” to designate the destruction of European Jewry during the Second World War. I have since been persuaded that “holocaust” should not be used for two reasons: (1) It bears the additional meaning of ‘a whole burnt offering,’ which is certainly not the theological overtone to be sounded in this context. And (2), the destruction of European Jewry happened to Jews and, hence, it is they who should have the sad honor of naming this event with a Hebrew term. The word “shoah” has been used for a long time in Hebrew to denote the catastrophe to Jewry during World War II and has even been adopted by many non-Jews as the proper designation. I now adopt this usage and acknowledge my debt to Professor Jean Halpérin of Geneva and Fribourg for the insight. In addition, as a matter of theological and moral principle, I do not capitalize words like “führer,” “final solution,” “nazi,” etc.

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the Committee on Conscience that was charged with selecting issues that were shoah-like and publishing calls for action. I am proud to note that much of the attention given to the genocide in Darfur has emanated from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. I am also pleased to note the opening at the Museum in the spring of 2009 of an exhibition entitled, “From Memory to Action.” One of the reasons why the Museum has not been more morally active is the nature of the political culture of governmental institutions, especially here in the nation’s capital. The other reason is that, in order to prevent another shoah-like event, one must have an analysis of the cause, or causes, of the shoah. This is not so simple. If one believes that the chief cause of the shoah was antisemitism, then a program of education and political action follows from that. If one accepts that the main root was radical right-wing political conservatism, a different strategy of education and action follows. If one concludes that the principal source was authoritarian culture, or racism, or lack of civic and moral courage, yet other designs for education and action follow. If the shoah resulted from a combination of causes, still different agendas ensue. By contrast, if one accepts that the shoah resulted from specific historical circumstances that cannot, by the nature of things, ever be repeated, then no moral mission devolves from our efforts. I believe that we must develop an analysis of the causes of the shoah and I believe that, from that analysis, we can propound general and specific programs of education and action that will help prevent another shoah-like event. Without this, we cannot, it seems to me, fulfill the moral mission of this great institution. Permit me, therefore, to put before you an analysis of the shoah and, then, a program of action.4 Analysis: Insertion into a Hierarchy that Teaches Evil In a series of experiments, Stanley Milgram5 and his team from Yale University required subjects to administer what they believed were painful and/or lethal electric shocks to innocent people in order to help them

4 For a fuller analysis of the issues presented here, see my The Banality of Good and Evil: Moral Lessons from the Shoah and Jewish Tradition (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 1999). This is now available also in French: La Banalité du Bien et du Mal (Paris: Le Cerf, 2009). See also the series of articles I have written on this subject; they are available on my website: http://www.js.emory.edu/BLUMENTHAL under “Articles.” 5 S. Milgram, Obedience to Authority: An Experimental View (New York: Harper and Row, 1974); also available as a film.

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learn a set of associated words. When the subjects showed signs of nervousness as the pain and discomfort of the learners increased, they were instructed firmly by the experimenters to continue. When subjects indicated that they refused responsibility for the consequences of their actions, the authority figures regularly replied that they, the experimenters, would assume that responsibility, thus enabling the subjects to continue administering dangerous and even lethal shocks to innocent persons. Quite contrary to expectations, 50–65% of the subjects followed instructions into the lethal range of shocks (35, 60–1). The percentage reached 85% in Germany (171) and among young people generally (173). No difference was registered for women (62–3). With unrelenting clarity, Milgram notes that these results were not a function of class, religious affiliation, gender, location, educational background, ideology, or general culture (62–3, 170). Nor were they a result of character or psychopathology (187). Milgram concluded that hierarchy and authority are inherent in any society (152) and that this hierarchy and authority are internalized and serve as the basis for obedience to legitimate authority (141). He further concluded that conscience, which regulates impulsive aggressive action, is diminished at the point of entering a hierarchical structure (132) such that the person enters an “agentic state” in contrast to the usual “autonomous state” (132–4). In the agentic state, morality becomes obedience to authority; that is, that which is good is obedience to the authority (145–6). In somewhat more technical terms, in entering the agentic state, the superego is shifted from independent evaluation of the morality of action to the judgment of how well one has functioned in the hierarchical-authoritative setting (146). More simply, Milgram showed that people will do what they are told to do, even when they know it is wrong, if they are told to do it in a structured situation by a legitimate authority. In a series of experiments dealing with American racism, Jane Elliot,6 an elementary school teacher in Riceville, Iowa, divided her class into brown-eyed and blue-eyed children. She, then, indicated that one group was “good” and the other “bad,” reinforcing this by according favored status to one group and discriminating against the other. In a very short time, the favored group began to discriminate viciously against the disfavored group. In a remarkable piece of instruction, Ms. Elliot, in the succeeding days, reversed herself, announcing that she had erred and that the 6 Film, “In the Eye of the Storm” and later in a film, “A Class Divided”; the latter appeared as a book by W. Peters, A Class Divided Then and Now (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987).

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disfavored group was really the favored one. Again, the now-favored group took its privileged status seriously and discriminated against the nowdisfavored group. The noteworthy element here is that the students accepted wholeheartedly the authority of the teacher, in her classroom, and followed her suggestion about superiority and the way one treats those who are inferior. They, too, inserted themselves into a hierarchy of authority, entered an agentic state, and performed acts they should have known were wrong. Astoundingly, they did this even when Ms. Elliot reversed herself a few days later by simply realigning her teaching from one group to the other. Later work by Ms. Elliot showed that this “experiment” works in prisons and elsewhere, that is, among adults, because they too accept, and act upon, the authority of someone legitimately placed in the social hierarchy.7 There are many more such experiments, loosely labeled “obedience experiments,”8 all of which clearly show that, in a situation in which there is a legitimate authority present, people will do what that authority figure asks even if they think it is not right. The historical study of the shoah reveals much the same data and conclusions: With the invasion of Russia, the crack troops of the German army and the SS divisions moved out of Poland to form the fighting units and the Einsatzgruppen. However, there were still almost 3,000,000 Jews left in Poland who, according to the final solution, needed to be exterminated. Who was minding the store? Who would carry out this project? In a stunning book, Christopher Browning9 follows the history of Police Battalion 101, a group of men who weren’t fit for the fighting units, whose job it became to carry out their part in the final solution in Poland. Sometimes, this meant shooting everyone, person by person; at other times, it included shooting the sick, the weak, the elderly, and the infants while forcibly deporting the rest. The transformation of this remarkably undistinguished group of men,

7 This is clear from “A Class Divided.” My students tell me that Ms. Elliot appeared on the Oprah Winfrey show with great success. 8 One of the most astounding is the Stanford Prison experiment. See P. G. Zimbardo et al.,“The Psychology of Imprisonment: Privation, Power, and Pathology,” Doing Unto Others, edited by Z. Rubin (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1974); available in slide presentation and, later, in a film, “Quiet Rage”; see also New York Times Magazine, April 8, 1973. 9 C. Browning, Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland (New York: Harper Collins, 1992). See also, idem., “Ordinary Germans or Ordinary Men,” Address and Response at the Inauguration of the Dorot Chair of Modern Jewish and Holocaust Studies, edited by D. Blumenthal (Atlanta, GA: Emory University, 1994): 7–14.

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only 25–30% of whom were members of the nazi party (48), into mass murderers is one of the most horrifying stories of the shoah. Browning carefully reconstructs the actions of Police Battalion 101 taking into account all the appropriate problems of dealing with such historical sources and concludes that 80–90% of the men continued to kill Jews while only 10–20% of the men refused, asked to be excused, or simply evaded the killing tasks (74, 160). Of those who continued to kill, a small percentage became hardened killers who enjoyed their work and volunteered for killing missions; the greatest number “did everything that was asked of them and never risked confronting authority.”10 Browning also points out that the work of this group of men who, by November 1942, had executed 6,500 Jews and deported 42,000 more (121), was not a single episode but an ongoing, relentless task that required sustained attention (132). It was, thus, not a battle-frenzy as in My Lai but “atrocity by policy” (160–1). Furthermore, this was not depersonalized action but hands-on killing with high salience to the victims (162). These men were not specially selected, nor were they selfselected (165–9). There was no special coercion and no “putative duress” (170–1).11 In an attempt to wonder why and how this happened, Browning admits the effect of brutalization and numbing, of the context of racial war, of psychological splitting, and of ideology. However, he maintains that these factors were contributory, subsidiary (161, 163, 182, 184). The main mechanism that enabled these ordinary men to become “grass roots” killers was insertion into the hierarchy of army command. Their officers only needed to invoke the authority of their hierarchy to obtain obedience, even though it was sometimes accompanied by anger and upset (69, 74, 151, 171–75). Peer pressure—not to be “weak” but to be “tough” (150, 183)—reinforced authority; it did not create it (175). In another study of ordinary Germans done in the 1950’s, Milton Mayer12 went to a small village in Germany and, hiding his Jewish identity,

10 “Ordinary Germans or Ordinary Men,” 11; see also page 9 where he calls these men “grass roots” killers. 11  It is now well-known that there is not one single case of a person put to death for refusing to kill Jews. See Browning, 170; E. Klee, et al., “The Good Old Days,” transl. D. Burnstone (New York: Free Press, 1988, 1991): 75–86, with 80 and 82 for Himmler’s verbal and written orders on the subject; and D. Kitterman, “Those Who Said, ‘No!’: Germans Who Refused to Execute Civilians during World War II,” German Studies Review 9:2 (May 1988): 241–54. See Browning, 103, that those who resisted were yelled at but not disciplined. 12 M. Mayer, They Thought They Were Free: The Germans 1933–1945 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1955, 1966): 44–45.

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interviewed the local people about life under nazism. The motif of insertion into a hierarchy which does, or tolerates, evil was very strong: “When ‘big men,’ Hindenbergs, Neuraths, Schachts, and even Hohenzollerns, accepted Nazism, little men had good and sufficient reason to accept it. ‘Wenn die “Ja” sagen,’ said Herr Simon, the bill-collector, ‘dann sagen wir auch “Ja. . . .”’ ‘What was good enough for them was certainly good enough for us.’ ‘. . . My friends were little men—like the Führer himself.’ ” Many more such historical studies exist,13 all of which show that German civilians as well as military were inserted into a hierarchy in which the authorities taught them that evil was good. In the agentic state that such insertion evokes, doing good became synonymous with following instructions. Analysis: Insertion into a Hierarchy that Teaches Good One of the first conferences which the United States Holocaust Memorial Council held was the one in which we, at the behest of Elie Wiesel, brought together the rescuers. We, as members of the Council and the Board of Advisors and we, as Jews, bent over backwards to acknowledge the courage, indeed the heroism, of these people who had come to us here in Washington. But they would have none of it. How often did we hear, “I was not a hero,” “I did nothing extraordinary”? How often did we hear, “I was just doing what was expected of me,” “I was just doing the normal human thing”? At first, I thought these people were just being modest but then I realized that they really meant it. They did not see themselves as heroes, nor as exceptional people; rather, they saw themselves as ordinary people who were just responding to what they knew was being demanded of them by their church, by their pastor, by their resistance leaders, by their parents, or by their conscience.14 They were being normal, in much the same way as the perpetrators were being normal. They were doing what was expected of them, in much the same way

13 See, for example, the study of German jurists: I. Müller, Hitler’s Justice: The Courts of the Third Reich, transl. D. L. Schneider (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991)— reviewed by me in Modern Judaism 13 (1993): 95–106. 14 In 2005, I spoke on this subject at a conference and a chaplain to the firemen who served in the 9/11 inferno came to me and said that this was exactly what his firemen were saying: that they had not been heroes; that they were only doing their job, doing what was expected of them.

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as the perpetrators were doing what was expected of them. That thought astounded me and set me thinking. Historical study of the shoah supports these observations: Fogelman15 quotes one Christian as asking, “What would Jesus do?” (177) and another as saying, “I have to save these people, as many as I can. If I am disobeying orders, I’d rather die with God and against men than with men and against God” (201). She also observes: “Indeed, this conviction among religious rescuers—that they were accountable to a higher and more fearsome authority—was the most salient aspect of their rescuer self. It overcame antisemitism, transcended fear, and impelled them to action” (176–77). Kurek-Lesik16 cites the following: “I come from nationalist circles, often charged with anti-Semitism. Why did I save Jewish children? Because they were children, because they were people. I would save any man [sic] in danger of death, and a child—every child—is particularly dear to me. This is what my Catholic religion orders me to do.” . . . A persecuted Jew somehow stopped being a Jew and became simply a man, woman, or child in need of help. The Polish nuns were motivated by a Christian duty towards others and by their fidelity to the ideal that they were pledged to do so in a special way by their vows. . . . This is why saving Jews and Jewish children should first of all be seen in the broader context of monastic service to humanity (330–32, emphasis added).

Sometimes, the authority invoked was not religion but national resistance. Thus, Baron notes that 42% of the Dutch rescuers were also in the resistance and, hence, saving Jews was sanctioned by the political authority of the resistance even if one had no particular religious or social feeling for Jews (312–13).17 Social psychology, too, brings its insights forward: In a dramatic series of experiments, Staub18 took groups of various ages, assigned them an irrelevant task, and then gave them one of three sets of instructions: one sub-group was given permission to leave the task room if necessary; one 15 E. Fogelman, Conscience and Courage: Rescuers of Jews during the Holocaust (New York: Anchor Books, 1994)—reviewed by me in Journal of Psychology and Theology 23 (1995): 62–63. 16 E. Kurek-Lesik, “The Role of Polish Nuns in the Rescue of Jews, 1939–1945,” in P. Oliner, et al., Embracing the Other: Philosophical, Psychological, and Historical Perspectives (New York: New York University Press, 1992): 328–34—reviewed by me in Pastoral Psychology 46:2 (1997): 131–34. 17 See especially the very fine study of S. and P. Oliner, The Altruistic Personality: Rescuers of Jews in Nazi Europe (New York: Free Press, 1988). 18 E. Staub, “Helping a Distressed Person,” in L. Berkowitz, Advances in Experimental Social Psychology (New York: Academic Press, 1974): 7: 293–341.

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sub-group was given no instructions on leaving the task room; and one subgroup was prohibited from leaving the room. Then, from an adjacent area, cries of distress were simulated. The purpose of the experiment was to test resistance to authority in a situation that evoked helping behavior as a response to the distress stimulus. The experiment showed that, when permission was given, a “high frequency of helping behavior” resulted and, conversely, when prohibition was the instruction, it “substantially reduced active attempts to help.” In the case of no information, adults tended to help while children tended to refrain from helping (323–4). Staub summarizes the results dramatically: “Almost all subjects in the permission condition actively helped” (313, emphasis original). These experiments confirm the insights of the previous section on obedience; to wit, that insertion into a hierarchy of authority is very important in determining a person’s willingness to act—except that the inescapable result of this experiment is that authority can permit ethically correct behavior; that is, that authority can function, as authority, to justify and permit prosocial action. In yet another well-known experiment, Darley and Batson19 took a group of 67 Princeton Theological Seminary students and administered to them a series of personality and religiosity psychometric tests. They, then, gave the students the parable of the Good Samaritan (Luke 10: 29–37) to study, and assigned half of them to deliver a homily on the parable and half of them to prepare a brief talk on alternate ministry. The testing and studying were done in one building and the homily or talk was done in another. Each group was, then, divided into three sub-groups: one was “high-hurry,” that is, they were told to hurry to the second location to complete the assignment; one was “intermediate-hurry,” that is, they were told to go directly to the second location; and one was “low-hurry,” that is, they were told they had ample time to get to the second location. A suffering victim, who was actually a confederate in the experiment, was placed on the way to the second location. The purpose of the experiment was to see how many theology students, who had just studied the parable of the Good Samaritan and were preparing either to give a short homily on the subject or to talk about alternate ministry, would stop to aid this experimental victim—as the Good Samaritan 19 J. M. Darley and C. D. Batson, “From Jerusalem to Jericho: A Study of Situational and Dispositional Variables in Helping Behavior,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 27:1 (1973): 100–8.

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had stopped to aid a victim by the wayside—and to determine what kind of help they would offer. Sixty percent (60%), that is, more than half, did not stop to offer help to the victim on the wayside. Of the 40% who did stop, 10% were in the “high-hurry” group, 45% in the “intermediate-hurry” group, and 63% in the “low-hurry” group. The conclusions were quite clear: A person not in a hurry may stop and offer help to a person in distress. A person in a hurry is likely to keep going. Ironically, he is likely to keep going even if he is hurrying to speak on the parable of the Good Samaritan, thus inadvertently confirming the point of the parable. (Indeed, on several occasions, a seminary student going to give his talk on the parable of the Good Samaritan literally stepped over the victim as he hurried on his way!) . . . It is hard to think of a context in which norms concerning helping those in distress are more salient than for a person thinking about the Good Samaritan, and yet it did not significantly increase helping behavior (107, parentheses original).

Darley and Batson, then, speculated on the cause of this phenomenon: Why were the seminarians in a hurry? Because the experimenter, whom the subject was helping, was depending on him to get to a particular place quickly. In other words, he was in conflict between stopping to help the victim and continuing on his way to help the experimenter. . . . Conflict, rather than callousness, can explain their failure to stop (108, emphasis original).

A closer look at Milgram’s obedience experiments also reveals the power of authority and obedience to sanction prosocial behavior: One of the subjects was a professor of Old Testament. The subject discontinued the experiment after reaching 150 volts saying, “If he [the learner / victim] doesn’t want to continue, I’m taking orders from him.” In the post-experiment discussion, the professor said, “If one had as one’s ultimate authority God, then it trivializes human authority” (47–9). Authority and obedience to that authority—in this case, the victim and then God—sanctioned prosocial action. In yet another set of experiments, two experimenters were brought into the room, one who advocated continuing the experiment and one who advocated discontinuing it (105–7). In this case of split authority, “[N]ot a single subject ‘took advantage’ of the instructions to go on; in no instance did individual aggressive motives latch on to the authoritative sanction provided by the malevolent authority. Rather, action was stopped dead in its tracks” (107). Milgram maintained that this was because of a ‘contamination’ of the hierarchical system, noting that some subjects tried to ascertain which experimenter was the higher authority (107). It seems to me, however, that the presence of two

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authorities, one sanctioning antisocial action and the other sanctioning prosocial action, allowed or permitted the subjects to follow the impulse to do good precisely because they had a choice of which authority to follow. The conclusion, then, is quite consistent: People who do prosocial acts also invoke a higher authority to sanction their actions; they, too, enter into an agentic state. Analysis: Insertion into a Hierarchy—the Case of the Children The evidence both from social psychology and from the historical study of the shoah is quite clear: People live within social hierarchies. In those hierarchies, there are legitimate authorities. People enter an agentic state with these legitimate authorities. People do what these authorities ask, or expect, them to do—whether the action be good or bad. This is particularly clear in the case of children where the hierarchies and authorities—family, school, sport, church, and peer groups—are particularly visible to the observer. Again, both the evidence from the shoah and the evidence from social psychology show that being in a hierarchy in which the legitimate authority teaches and sanctions violence produces violent behavior and, conversely, being in a hierarchy in which the legitimate authority teaches and sanctions caring behavior produces caring behavior. Alice Miller,20 in her profound study of German culture looks into the personal-developmental history of Germans using the tools of both cultural history and therapeutic case studies. The case of Hitler’s screaming, as recorded in such films as Triumph of the Will, serves as a paradigm for Miller’s general theory of the origin of social evil: Authoritarian culture permits a father to abuse his children—verbally, emotionally, and physically. Furthermore, this culture and these phenomena allow the adult abused child to do evil with one aspect of the self, to be “normal” with the other, and to sustain both selves in a tense but workable coexistence. In a similarly famous study of prejudice, Adorno21 also concluded that the authoritarian personality can be characterized as one which grew up

20 A. Miller, For Your Own Good, transl. H. and H. Hannum (New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1983). 21  T. W. Adorno, et al., The Authoritarian Personality, abridged edition (New York: W. W. Norton and Co., 1950, 1982).

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in, and perpetuates, an atmosphere of harsh discipline: “Prejudiced subjects tend to report a relatively harsh and more threatening type of home discipline which was experienced as arbitrary by the child. Related to this is a tendency apparent in families of prejudiced subjects to base interrelationships on rather clearly defined roles of dominance and submission in contradistinction to equalitarian policies. In consequence, the images of parents seem to acquire for the child a forbidding or at least a distant quality. Family relationships are characterized by fearful subservience to the demands of the parents and by an early suppression of impulses not acceptable to them” (256–7). The Oliners22 have put it well: . . . punishment implies the need to curb some intrinsic wildness or evil intent. Routine gratuitous punishment implies that powerful persons have the right to exert their will arbitrarily. . . . Having had little influence over their parents’ behavior, [such children] are more inclined to feel a sense of helplessness in influencing others generally. . . . Human relationships are construed in power terms, superordination and subordination viewed as the inherent social condition of humankind. The best one can do in the face of power is to succumb.

The more abusive the environment, then, the more the child is subject to the whim of the abusive parent. Punishment is erratic, unpredictable, and capricious as well as invasive and violent. This is both physically harmful as well as psychologically destabilizing.23 In its extreme form, harsh discipline can turn very ugly. Miller notes that authoritarian, child-abusive culture generates great inner rage which is turned inward by repression and, then, outward by projection. Indeed, Germans felt a sense of relief upon reading Mein Kampf and learning that it was permissible to hate the Jews because this meant that all their anger at their own abused and despised selves—the product of abusive childhood discipline—could be projected onto the Jews. This, in turn, led to the cruelty toward, and extermination of, the Jews (166, 187–8): [They] led a million children, whom they regarded as the bearers of the feared portions of their own psyche, into the gas chambers. One can even imagine that by shouting at them, beating them, or photographing them, they were finally able to release the hatred going back to early childhood. From the start, it had been the aim of their upbringing to stifle their childish, 22 The Altruistic Personality, 182–3. 23 All first-year psychology students are familiar with the experiments in which rats that are subjected to erratic and excessive electric shocks are driven “insane.”

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how might another shoah be prevented? playful, and life-affirming side. The cruelty inflicted on them, the psychic murder of the child they once were, had to be passed on in the same way: each time they sent another Jewish child to the gas ovens, they were in essence murdering the child within themselves (86–7).24

Or, as F. Katz has commented:25 Evil can be, and sometimes has been, developed into a culture of cruelty, a distinctive culture in its own right. As such it is systematically organized to reward individuals for their acts of cruelty: for being creative at inventing cruelties and for establishing a personal reputation for their particular version of cruelty. Here cruelty can be a macabre art-form . . . here, too, cruelty can be a distinctive “economy,” where one’s credit rating depends on one’s level of cruelty—the more cruel, the higher one’s standing. By contrast, acts of kindness can lead to publicly declared bankruptcy, and in some situations the punishment for this bankruptcy is a death sentence. . . . we must admit that, under some circumstances, individuals will deliberately choose to do evil. For example, a culture of cruelty can be highly attractive. It can offer an individual the opportunity to live creatively, and creative living touches on a profound human yearning. At times individuals may discover that acting cruelly is a way, perhaps the only way, they can be creative. They are then likely to embrace a culture of cruelty when some facilitating conditions exist in their immediate context.

One can conclude from these and other studies that early childhood discipline which is excessive and erratic—that is, abusive in its broad sense— helps to create the authoritarian personality, thereby facilitating the doing of evil. Excessive and erratic discipline does this by instilling an attitude of obedience, by bullying and frightening the child into submission. Excessive and erratic discipline also creates a deep anger in the abused self. This anger, indeed rage, must be suppressed because the child cannot retaliate against the parent; however, it is very likely to surface in later hostile acts which will be directed against the helpless, socially stigmatized other. Antisocial childrearing cultivates the xenophobic, rigid, submissive, and totalitarian personality, creating thereby the possibility for the doing of evil. The evidence for children who have been raised prosocially is equally as probative. As the Oliners have shown, a commitment to caring for other 24 In the psychobiographical section on Hitler (142–97), Miller gives evidence that Hitler’s father was abusive and also that Hitler had a personality that was split and seriously repressed, that he idealized and identified with his father, and that he projected his idealized father into the image of the führer while he projected the part of his childhood that needed to be repressed and extinguished onto the Jews (156ff., 176–80). 25 Ordinary People and Extraordinary Evil (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1993): 31 and 127, emphasis original.

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human beings was deeply rooted in childhood attitudes of the rescuers toward authority and punishment. A disciplinary milieu characterized by reason and proportion is central: . . . significantly fewer rescuers recalled any controls imposed on them by the most intimate persons in their early lives. . . . parents of rescuers depended significantly less on physical punishment and significantly more on reasoning. . . . Thus, it is in their reliance on reasoning, explanations, suggestions of ways to remedy the harm done, persuasion, and advice that parents of rescuers differed most from non-rescuers (Altruistic Personality, 179–81).  It [parental punishment] includes a heavy dose of reasoning—explanations of why behaviors are inappropriate, often with reference to their consequences for others. Physical punishment is rare: when used, it tends to be a singular event rather than routine. Gratuitous punishment—punishment that serves as a cathartic release of aggression for the parent or is unrelated to the child’s behavior—almost never occurs (Altruistic Personality, 249).

Fogelman, too, notes that studies of anti-nazi German men show their homes to have been “more accepting and less rigid” while studies of rescuers show that they experienced “a loving and trusting relationship with an affectionate mother [and] had a communicative and non-authoritarian father.” These studies supported her own findings of parents of rescuers “who explained rules and used inductive reasoning” (255–7). The Oliners account for the connection between prosocial behavior and prosocial childhood discipline as follows: Reasoning communicates a message of respect for and trust in children that allows them to feel a sense of personal efficacy and warmth toward others. It is based on a presumption of error rather than a presumption of evil intent. It implies that had children but known better or understood more, they would not have acted in an inappropriate way. It is a mark of esteem for the listener; an indication of faith in his or her ability to comprehend, develop and improve (Altruistic Personality, 182). Parents have power over children; they are not only physically stronger but also have access to material resources they can bestow or withhold. Societal norms generally support their superior position. . . . When adults voluntarily abdicate the use of power in favor of explanation, they are modeling appropriate behavior toward the weak on the part of the powerful. Faced with powerless others, children so raised in turn have at their disposal an internal “script”—a store of recollections, dialogues, and activities ready to be activated. They need not depend on innovation or improvisation but rather simply retrieve what is already imprinted on their memories (Altruistic Personality, 183).

The conclusion to be drawn on hierarchy and children is clear: Patterns of antisocial childhood discipline, ranging from unnecessarily strict to outright abusive behaviors, create an authoritarian personality which

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will conform to the demands of authority and may even be drawn into a culture of cruelty. Patterns of prosocial childhood discipline, in which authority acts with measured and reasoned behavior and allows itself to be challenged, create an altruistic personality which will question the demands of authority and is likely to be drawn into a culture of care.26 Implications for this Analysis: Five Commandments for Cultivating Prosocial Action The implication of this analysis is quite simple to articulate, now that we have an analysis: If we wish to prevent another shoah-like event, we must recognize that, willy nilly, we live in social hierarchies; that, whether we like it or not, we are authorities within social hierarchies; and that, as such, it is our obligation to exercise our authority in a prosocial way. This is easier said than done but it does need to be said and to be explicated. How, then, would one cultivate authority that is prosocial? That is the question. I have not been able to present the full case here but the evidence from the scientific experiments, as well as from the historical data for the shoah, Vietnam, and other cases, shows clearly that formal instruction in religious schools or in secular philosophy simply does not, in and of itself, help. Moral education and ethics discussions do not, in and of themselves, make people more prosocial.27 It is, rather, the ability to navigate the authority of social hierarchies that counts. To accomplish this, permit me to propose five commandments for cultivating prosocial action. (1) Teach the nature of social processes. Secular and religious educators, at all age levels, must provide formal instruction about the social processes within which we live and make moral decisions. Discuss the terms: authority, obedience, disobedience, resistance, protest, heteronomy and autonomy, norms, rules, values, normocentric, agentic shift, salience, permission, in-group/out-group, conflict management, conflict resolution, win-win, socialization, identification, modeling, peer support, and incremental learning. Discuss the nature of hierarchies and the effect of 26 There are, of course, many other factors that facilitate the doing of evil and of good such as: real or perceived threats, role modeling, peer pressure, incremental praxis, formal and informal socialization to values, xenophobia, the use of the language of caring or exclusiveness, identification, concepts of role, duty, and discipline, etc. See Banality, part one, and my website, under “Articles.” 27 See the argument in Banality, 128–32.

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excessive vs. caring discipline. Ask: “What is the social hierarchy in this particular situation?” “To whom are you subordinate? To whom are you superior?” “Is there more than one authority at work here? more than one set of subordinates?” “Upon what is the legitimacy of the authority in this situation based?” “What would you have to do to break the rule, the norm? What would you have to do to challenge the authority?” “Are you, as an authority, acting in a responsible way, within the limits of your legitimacy? And, if not, how do you as an authority challenge your own authority and reshape it?” Teach the works of Milgram, Kelman and Hamilton, the Oliners, Browning, and others. Show the films and discuss them. An understanding, no matter how tentative, of these processes is the important first step. (2) Establish a means by which authority can be challenged. The evidence clearly shows that, under normal circumstances, the overwhelming majority of people will not defy legitimate social authority even if asked to do something they know is wrong. Therefore, responsible leadership requires that authority itself set up a means by which its own judgment can be challenged. In a school, business, hospital, government, synagogue, church, or volunteer organization, even in a family: Set up an ombudsperson or an ombuds-committee who will hear appeals of disciplinary action taken by the central hierarchy. Set up a whistle-blowing mechanism that will enable criticism of the hierarchy. Set up a “care team” that will evaluate, not the efficiency with which the task of the organization is being carried out, but the caring quality of the relationships between members of the organization, particularly those relationships that are hierarchical. (3) Identify and teach prosocial skills. There are specific prosocial skills that, if learned and practiced, facilitate the doing of prosocial acts. Teach, first, the identifying and coding of one’s own feelings. Our feelings are basic to who we are; they are the ground for much of our being and the agency for much of our action. We, therefore, need to know our own feelings. Ask: “What did you feel when you saw such and such a person being beaten up or being verbally abused?” “Can you yourself recall feeling ashamed, guilty, joyous, powerful, hurt, nurturing, modest, immodest, content?” “What is the difference between anger and rage? Have you ever felt either? What was it like?” “How do you feel when someone threatens you, challenges you publicly, or praises you in front of others?” Then, teach perspective taking and empathy. Ask: “What do you think he or she feels?” “What does she or he feel even if she or he cannot express it?” “How angry, happy, ashamed, proud . . . is he or she?” “What would you feel in that person’s place?” “What is empathy? What is sympathy?” Everyone is capable of perspective-taking and everyone will need to be the object of perspective-taking by others in

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the course of life. Being able to identify one’s feelings and to empathize with the other are important prosocial skills. (4) Use the language of justice and caring. The way we phrase what we want to say forms who we are and who we become. Discuss the words: pity, compassion, concern, affection, love, care, cherish, nourish, protect, understanding, empathy, kindness, mercy, sympathy, attachment, devotion, heart, feeling, respect, awareness, recognition, intimacy, attention, warmth, and consideration. And their complements: pain, sorrow, grief, worry, anxiety, distress, suffering, trouble, oversensitivity, intimidate, persecute, threaten, and terror. Discuss the terms: inclusiveness, extensivity, globalism, goodness, kindness, justice, fairness, law, integrity, virtue, uprightness, rectitude, equity, impartiality, righteousness, ethics, caring, morality, protest, resistance, bonding, humanness, and humanity. And their complements: exclusiveness, isolationism, ethnic superiority, injustice, oppression, prejudice, unfairness, uncritical compliance, inhumaneness, and inhumanity. Only by discussing and using the language of caring and justice can we change who we are. (5) Do something. In cultivating a prosocial society, all the teaching and all the discussing is useless unless it leads to action. Pick a cause, join an action group, and protest, or organize, or lobby. Seek out models and imitate them. Do whatever you legitimately need to do to bring your cause to the attention of the authorities. At first, it may seem awkward but, through the well-studied process of incremental learning, it will get easier. 28 Conclusion The shoah, in all its horror, did not come into existence in a vacuum. It arose from specific historical circumstances. But it also arose as the result of specific social-psychological conditions that are inherent to all human society. To prevent another shoah-like event, we must study closely these social-psychological conditions in the laboratory and in history, and then draw conclusions about these conditions. Then, we must—at least so it seems to me—draw inferences about how to structure society and its 28 There are, of course, other prescriptions for creating a prosocial society such as: identifying and teaching prosocial value concepts, teaching critical thinking, teaching conflict management skills and networking, learning the many forms of formal and informal protest, developing salience, and developing formal syllabi and curricula with active internship possibilities. See Banality, part two and the appendices, as well as my website.

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institutions so that these conditions can be guided, indeed used, to create an environment in which illegitimate authority will be confronted and challenged, individually and as a group, and in which legitimate authority will encourage and sustain prosocial initiatives from those who follow authority. It is by analyzing and then by acting on the analysis to shape authority into a prosocial entity that we will be able to prevent another shoah.

MAIMONIDES’ PHILOSOPHIC MYSTICISM1 David R. Blumenthal The Exoteric and the Esoteric Maimonides The period of Judeo-Islamic philosophy is usually characterized as a convivencia, a symbiotic ecumenical relationship, which bound Muslims, Jews, and Christians into a fellowship of students and scholars of philosophy. The topics raised by Greek science and philosophy in its Arabic transmission were those discussed across tradition-specific lines. Philosophers of differing faiths read one another, sometimes even studied with one another, and addressed common issues in their writings even as they often differed on how to interpret those issues. The Islamic context for the study of science and philosophy was not, however, quite as sanguine as modern scholars portray it to have been.2 Philosophy, which encouraged critical thinking, was often seen by authoritarian Muslim powers with a very suspicious eye. As Joel Kraemer has put it:3 For Islam, as for Judaism, the religious law is paramount, a comprehensive guide to life in all its aspects. Study of the Qor’an, tradition (hadith), theology (kalam), and jurisprudence ( fiqh) dominated Muslim intellectual life. The ʿulama‌ʾ (clerics) regarded “the ancient sciences” as alien and useless, as an insidious threat to religious faith. Taqi al-Din ibn Taymiyya (d. 1328), exemplifying this attitude, says that only science inherited from the prophet [Muhammad] deserves to be called science; the rest is either useless or not science at all.

1 Maimonides and Mysticism, edited by A. Elqayam and D. Schwartz, Da’at 64–66 (2009): v–xxv; modified and reprinted in D. Blumenthal, Philosophic Mysticism: Studies in Rational Religion (Ramat Gan: Bar Ilan University Press, 2006): 128–51. © copyright Bar-Ilan University, Ramat Gan, Israel. http://www.biupress.co.il/website_en/index .asp?action=show_coverscovers_mode=home_page. This topic is so complex that I have chosen to create a “Selected Bibliography.” With this in mind, footnotes contain only brief bibliographic references. In Philosophic Mysticism, there is no separate Selected Bibliography; rather, the book contains one full bibliography. 2 The wish to see medieval Islam as a “golden age” of ecumenical, friendly, universal scholarly interchange is part of the “orientalist” mentality which has been exposed in recent years. Among Jewish scholars, it was also part of the assimilationist prejudice. 3 J. Kraemer, “The Islamic Context of Medieval Jewish Philosophy,” 38 with n. 1.

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maimonides’ philosophic mysticism Ibn Rush (Averroes) (d. 1198), a philosopher and jurist [qadi], justified philosophy as a religious obligation, but his opinion had no effect on the career of philosophy in Islam, which was emphatically rejected by religious authorities. Even the Tunisian historian Ibn Khaldun (d. 1406) felt the need to refute philosophy. The medieval Islamic world had no universities as did Europe, where philosophy was taught alongside theology. Muslim rulers sponsored scientific research, which was institutionalized in libraries, hospitals, and observatories. Philosophers taught privately or to circles that met in their homes or in other venues such as bookstores.

The following narrative by al-Sa‌ʿid al-Andalusi concerning the confiscation of his father’s library was typical of the attitude of many Islamic authorities throughout the Islamic world:4 Those libraries held the previously mentioned collections of famous books as well as others; he [the chamberlain, Abu ʿAmir] showed these books to his entourage of theologians and ordered them to take from them all those dealing with the ancient science of logic, astronomy, and other fields, saving only the books on medicine and mathematics. The books that dealt with language, grammar, poetry, history, medicine, tradition, hadith, and other similar sciences that were permitted in Andalus were preserved. And he ordered that all the rest be destroyed. Only a very few were saved; the rest were either burned or thrown in the wells of the palace and covered with dirt and rocks. Abu ʿAmir performed this act to gain the support of the common people of al-Andalus and to discredit the doctrine of the Caliph alHakam. To justify this deed, he proclaimed that these sciences were not known to their ancestors and were loathed by their past leaders. Everyone who read them was suspected of heresy and of not being in conformity with Islamic laws. All who were active in the study of philosophy reduced their activities and kept, as secret, whatever they had pertaining to these sciences.

Muhammad ibn Masarra, Ibn Hazm, and even Al-Ghazzali also had bans pronounced against them, or had their books burned, or had an interdiction against studying their books proclaimed.5 Although some Islamic leaders were more tolerant of philosophy than others, in general the life of the philosopher in the Islamic lands was not easy. Drawing on this background of the persecution of science and philosophy in the Islamic world, Strauss and those who followed him developed a two-faced image of Maimonides:6 the “exoteric” Maimonides who wrote 4 Cited in J. Kraemer, “Maimonides and the Spanish Aristotelian School,” 47–48. 5 J. Kraemer, “Maimonides and the Spanish Aristotelian School,” 48. 6 L. Strauss, Persecution and the Art of Writing (Glencoe: The Free Press, 1952; reprinted often).

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codified law and simplified philosophy for the masses, and the “esoteric” Maimonides who wrote recondite philosophical allusions for the elite. The literature on this is vast and it goes to the heart of Maimonides’ political theories; that is, to his reading of Aristotle and Plato’s political works in the context of Islamic political theory. Those who argue for an esoteric-exoteric Maimonides use the instrumentalist, or double-truth, approach—that Maimonides had one teaching for the masses and one for the elite—also for Maimonides’ teaching on the true spiritual life.7 Following this line of interpretation but more subtly, Fox8 has argued that there is one teaching for the elite and for the masses but one must bear in mind that the elite are not elite all the time and, hence, they need the practice of the masses. Kaplan9 has argued much the same and Kreisel10 has argued that the intellectual worship of God is universally obligatory while Jewish ritual worship of God is obligatory only for Jews. I am disinclined to the view that sees Maimonides as two people. Rather, I argue that Maimonides saw himself as the authoritative voice for all Israel in matters of law and belief; he was, after all, the leading halakhic authority of his age and, for a while, the formal head of the leading Jewish community in the Fatimid empire. Knowing his readership well, Maimonides wrote for each according to that person’s ability. For those interested only in knowing what to do, he wrote the Mishne Torah, the code of law. For those interested only in knowing what to believe, he wrote the Principles of Faith and the initial chapters of the Mishne Torah. For those concerned with the reasons behind the law, he wrote about that. For those concerned with the deeper complexities of the law, he left hints and guides in the Mishne Torah. For those perplexed about natural and metaphysical knowledge, he wrote about that in the Mishne Torah and, in greater depth, in the Guide. For those deeply schooled in Islamic science and philosophy, he wrote with great subtlety, mostly in the Guide—not because of persecution, but because the subject matter and the audience required it. As I see it, then, there was a wide range of people for whom Maimonides wrote, from the ignorant to the better educated, to the elegantly formed in the physical and metaphysical sciences. To instruct the full array of his readers, it was necessary, as Maimonides himself wrote in the Introduction 7 E.g., Y. Levinger, “On the Reason for Nezirut”; G. Blidstein, “Joy in Maimonides.” 8 M. Fox, “Prayer in Maimonides.” 9 L. Kaplan, “ ‘I Sleep But My Heart Waketh.’ ” 10 H. Kreisel, “The Love and Fear of God.”

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to the Guide, to reveal and to conceal, to teach some things directly and others only subtly. To put it another way: What is “esoteric” for one, may well be “exoteric” for another. Yet, in the world of authoritative teaching, there is one Torah that has many, many layers of understanding and the authoritative teacher must write for everyone, each on their own level.11 This stratifying of people is most clearly seen in those places where Maimonides develops typologies of people—and there are many such places, including the Introduction to The Guide and the opening section of part 3, chapter 51. Always, these typologies are multi-layered; they are never bipolar.12 Given Maimonides’ desire to educate everyone, one could expect that his view of the true spiritual life would be divided into stages; and so it is. The preliminary stage is proper observance of the commandments. For Maimonides, this is an indispensable step; there can be no Jewish mysticism or spirituality without the law. Anyone who wants to be “religious” only needs to look up what to do in the Mishne Torah and then act accordingly. Since the Mishne Torah also includes basic matters of belief, following its prescriptions also guarantees proper belief. After the meticulous observance of the Torah, however, there are three further stages of true religious life: intellectual apprehension of God, intellectual contemplation of God, and continuous contemplation of God. The Three Stages of the True Spiritual Life According to Maimonides The first stage of true spirituality is intellectual apprehension of God (Ar., al-ʾidrak; Heb., ha-hasaga), also known as “love” of God (Ar., almahabba; Heb., ʾahava). In this type of spirituality, one acquires as much knowledge about God as possible. This includes knowledge of God’s creation (the laws of nature: physics and astrophysics with the appropriate math, biology, medicine, etc.); knowledge of what things can, and cannot, be said about God (the theory of attributes with the appropriate

11 As a member of the Jewish “Establishment,” I have often found myself in this position. When asked to talk about “Jewish mysticism” to large unknown groups, I always talk about Jewish spirituality and never go into the deeper recesses of Jewish mysticism. Similarly, when I first wrote about the Zoharic worldview in Understanding Jewish Mysticism, I consciously omitted writing about the sitra ahra, not wanting unschooled readers to be exposed to such a doctrine. Entitling my book on God and the shoah, Facing the Abusing God: A Theology of Protest, may have violated the rule that, when one teaches authoritatively, one must teach subtlety and indirectly. 12 For a list and analysis of these places, see D. Blumenthal, “PWM.”

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knowledge of logic and linguistics); and skill in interpreting holy texts so that they conform to one’s general knowledge. With these things, I explain the great general principles of the work of the Master of the universe so that they be, for one who understands, an opening to love God, as the Sages said concerning love [of God], “From this [i.e., study], you get to know Him Who spoke and the world was created.” (Mishne Torah, Hilkhot Yesode ha-Torah 2:2) When a person contemplates these things and gets to know all the created beings—the angel, the sphere, humanity, and such things—he or she13 increases her or his love for the Omnipresent. The soul of such a person will thirst for God, and the flesh will yearn to love the Omnipresent, may He be blessed. Such a person will be in awe and will be afraid of his or her lowliness, poorness [of spirit], and insignificance when compared with one of the great holy bodies [e.g., the spheres] and, even more so, [when compared with] one of the pure forms which are separate from matter and never had contact with it.14 Such a person will find herself or himself as a vessel full of shame and embarrassment, empty and lacking. (Ibid., 4:12)

The study of creation (nature) leads to love of God. Indeed, the accumulation of knowledge about creation is the love of God. Furthermore, the telos of learning is not knowledge itself. Rather, the purpose of knowledge of the natural world is a series of spiritual emotions—awe, fear, insignificance, shame, and embarrassment. The goal of study is a thirsting of the soul and a yearning of the body for God. Study is a type of religious experience; the intellectual is part of a larger spiritual realm. The second stage of true spirituality is intellectual contemplation of God, also known as “intellectual worship” of God (Ar., al-ʿibada al-ʿaqliyya; Heb., ha-ʿavoda ha-sikhlit) and as “passion” for God (Ar., al-ʿishq; Heb., hesheq). In this type of spirituality, one concentrates on abstract thinking, on pondering the most abstract and simple of concepts. But, and this is crucial, as one does this, one places oneself in the presence of God. In intellectual contemplation, one ponders the highest metaphysical concepts and one resides in the Divine presence. Intellectual contemplation (“worship,” “passion”), thus, comes after the intellectual love of God, though 13 Maimonides did not include women in those qualified to do work in metaphysics. On this, see M. Kellner, “Philosophical Misogyny in Medieval Jewish Thought: Gersonides and Maimonides” (Hebrew) and A. Melamed, “Maimonides on Women: Formless Matter or Potential Prophet.” In the interest of making Maimonides relevant to the modern world, however, I have added in egalitarian language where appropriate. By contrast, I do not use egalitarian language for God in texts that I translate, though I do use it in my own text. 14 The reference is to the Aristotelian forms that “in-form” matter to give it individual identity.

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it is rooted in, and grows from, the intellectual love of God. Intellectual contemplation is, thus, a step beyond intellectual love. It is the moment when thought fades into mystical experience. It is the transition from thinkingabout-God to being-in-the-presence of God. It is a mystical moment or, more appropriately, a mystical-intellectual way of being in the world. This kind of worship ought only to be engaged in after intellectual conception (Ar., al-tassawur al-ʿaqli) has been achieved. When you have apprehended God and His acts in accordance with what is required by the intellect, you should afterwards engage in totally devoting yourself to Him (Ar., al-ʾinqita‌ʿ ʾilayhi), endeavor to come close to Him (Ar., wa-tasʿi nahwa qurbihi), and strengthen the bond (Ar., al-wusla) between you and Him— that is, the intellect . . . The Torah has made it clear that this (last) worship to which we have drawn attention in this chapter can only be engaged in after apprehension (Ar., al-ʾidrak) has been achieved. It says: “to love the Lord your God and to worship Him with all your heart and with all your soul” (Dt. 11:13). Now we have made it clear several times (Guide 1:39; 3:28; etc.) that that love is proportionate to apprehension (Ar., al-mahabba ʿala qadri al-ʾidrak). After love comes this worship (Ar., al-ʿibada) to which attention has also been drawn by the Sages, may their memory be a blessing, who said, “This is the worship that is in the heart” (Talmud Bavli, Berakhot 2a; etc.). In my opinion it consists in setting thought to work on the first intelligible (Ar., ʾiʿmal al-fikra fi al-ma‌ʿqul al-ʾawwal) and in dedicating oneself exclusively to this (Ar., wal-ʾinfirad li-dhalika), as far as this is within one’s capacity. Therefore you will find that David commanded his son Solomon and fortified him in these two things, to endeavor to apprehend Him and to endeavor to worship Him after apprehension had been achieved. He said, “And you, Solomon my son, know the God of your father and worship Him” (I Chron. 28:9). (Guide 3:51; Pines 620–21)15 This is followed [in Ps. 91] by what is said about divine providence where it gives the reasons for this great protection, saying that the reason for this great providence being effective with regard to the individual in question is this: “Because he has set his passion upon Me (Heb., ki vi hashaq), therefore I will deliver him; I will set him on high, because he has known My Name (Heb., ki yada‌ʿ shemi)” (Ps. 91:14). We have already explained in the preceding chapters that the meaning of “knowledge of the Name” is apprehension of Him (Ar., ʾidrakuhu). It is as if [the psalm] said that this individual is protected because he has known Me and then afterwards set his passion upon Me (Ar., lima ʿarafani wa-ʿashiqani ba‌ʿda dhalika). You know the difference between the terms “one who loves” (Heb., ʾohev) and “one who has set his passion upon” (Heb., hosheq)—an excess of love such that no

15 I have used the translation of S. Pines but, in all passages cited, I have modified it where I think he missed the point; in addition, I have added emphasis.

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thought remains that is directed toward a thing other than the beloved is “passion” (Ar., al-ʿishq). (Guide 3:51; Pines 627)16

The text is rather straightforward: After the work of thinking and study, a person should ponder the intellectual results. In addition—and this is important—one should set oneself in the presence of the intellectual power which is the source of all thought, that is, God. This latter is a form of “contemplation” or, in the words of Maimonides, “passion for God” or “worship of God.” The difficult work of thinking, of gathering evidence and weighing its truth, is by contrast called by Maimonides “apprehension” or “love of God.” Both of them constitute an integral aspect of the intellectual-spiritual life of the person who strives for perfection (Ar., al-ʾinsan al-kamil).17 Intellectual effort alone is not enough; one must also make a spiritual, experiential effort if one wishes to attain to the telos of humanity. Most interesting is the fact that Maimonides, who was not deficient in the metaphysical and scientific vocabulary of his age, chose to use a series of non-philosophical words to describe this stage in the spiritual life of the person striving for perfection. It is important to highlight these terms by listing them: total devotion to Him (Ar., al-ʾinqita‌ʾ ʿilayhi) (twice in 3:51), exclusive dedication to Him (Ar., al-ʾinfirad), drawing close to Him (Ar., alqurb minhu) (twice), being present to Him in the true way (Ar., al-muthul bayna yadayhi ʿala al-jihat al-haqiqa), standing before Him (Ar., al-maqam ʿindahu), and bliss (Ar., al-ghibta; Heb. parallel, noʿam [Guide 2:43]) (five times).18 Note also: the contact (Ar., al-wusla) that is between you and Him which is the intellect (many times), setting thought to work on the first intelligible (Ar., ʾiʿmal al-fikra fi al-ma‌ʿqul al-ʾawwal), and an excess of love such that no thought remains that is directed toward a thing other than the beloved which is “passion” (Ar., al-ʿishq) (several times). Note especially Maimonides’ use of “union of their intellects” (Ar., ʾittihad ʿuqulihim) and his use of bliss (Ar., al-ghibta; Heb., noʿam).

16 Pines renders ʿishq / hesheq as “passionate love” which, I think blurs the distinction. I have, therefore, rendered “love” for mahabba / ʾahava and “passion” for ʿishq / hesheq. For a closer linguistic analysis of these and other terms in Maimonides’ mystical vocabulary, see “PWM.” 17 This phrase is routinely translated as “the perfect person / man”—which is absurd. No one is perfect, least of all in Maimonides’ world. I prefer, therefore, “the person striving for perfection.” 18 Pines and M. Schwartz translate al-ghibta as “joy” while Qafih renders it as “passion.” It is, however, precisely the mystical term “bliss” that is required by the context.

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All these terms find their source in the world of mysticism, not in the world of physics and metaphysics. It cannot be happenstance that Maimonides uses them; rather, he clearly intends to allude to a spiritual experience and reality that, though rooted in previous intellectual activity, transcends that realm. In order to describe this realm that is beyond rationalism, Maimonides has recourse to these clearly mystical terms. There can be no doubt then that, for Maimonides, the second phase of the true spiritual life included intellectual contemplation; that is, a pondering of the results of the work of the intellect while, at the same time, doing so within the presence of the living God. Precisely because Maimonides saw himself as, and in fact was, the authoritative teacher of his day, he was obligated to present to the public, even if subtly and with indirection, the experiential reality of philosophic mysticism—which is the proper term for this form of spiritual life. It was his responsibility to do so and, when philosophicscientific vocabulary failed him, he used mystical vocabulary. The third stage of true spirituality is the continuous contemplation of God. It is characterized by the recurrence of the Arabic word da‌ʾiman, meaning “continuous, always.” In these passages Maimonides describes a condition in which a person is in extended bliss (Ar., ghibta) or pleasure (Ar., lidhdha). In such a state, the bliss or pleasure is not a fleeting moment in human spiritual life but an ongoing state of mystical consciousness, one that attends a person always. Continuous contemplation is clearly an extension of intellectual contemplation that, in turn, is an extension of intellectual love. Each is an intensification of the previous step. Nonetheless, the three states seem clearly differentiable.19 It is continuous contemplation that is the end, the telos, of the person seeking perfection. Thus it is clear that, after apprehension (Ar., al-ʾidrak), total devotion to Him (Ar., al-ʾinqita‌ʿ ʾilayhi) and the employment of intellectual thought in passion for Him always (Ar., wa-ʾiʿmal al-fikra al-ʿaqliyya fi ʿishqihi da‌ʾiman) should be aimed at. (Guide 3:51; Pines, 621) There may be a human individual who, through one’s apprehension of the true realities and one’s bliss in what one has apprehended, achieves a state in which one talks with people and is occupied with one’s bodily necessities while one’s intellect is wholly turned toward Him (Ar., masruf nahwahu), may He be exalted, such that, in one’s heart one is always in His presence, may He be exalted (Ar., wa-huwa bayna yadayhi ta‌ʿala da‌ʾiman bi-qalbihi), even while outwardly one is with people—in the sort of way described by the poetical parables that have been invented for these

19 I did not use this analysis in my previous articles on philosophic mysticism.

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notions: “I sleep, but my heart is awake,” “The voice of my beloved knocks,” and so on . . . This is the rank of Moses, our master . . . this is the level of the patriarchs . . . Through them is explained the union with God, that is, apprehension and love of Him (Ar., al-ʾittihad bi-Allah, ʿa‌ʿni ʾidrakuhu wa-mahabbatuhu) and that the providence of God for them and their descendants is mighty (Ar. ʿazima) . . . Now this is, to my mind, a proof that they performed these actions with their limbs only, while their intellects were constantly in His presence, may He be exalted (Ar., wa-ʿuquluhum bayna yadayhi ta‌ʿala da‌ʾiman). (Guide 3:51; Pines, 623–24)

These passages, and others like them, clearly show a state of continuous contemplation, of optimal meditation, and equally clearly indicate that this state is the desired state for the person seeking perfection. Maimonides extended this state of continuous contemplation into his theory of providence to answer the question of God’s protection and of how evil, including death, befalls the righteous: [As to] the individual who is striving for perfection of the intellect (Ar., alshakhs al-kamil al-ʾidrak), whose intellect never ceases to be occupied with God (Ar., la yabrah ʿaqluhu ʿan Allah da‌ʾiman), providence will always be over that person (Ar., takun al-ʿinaya bihi da‌ʾiman). On the other hand, an individual striving for perfection, whose thought sometimes for a certain time is emptied of God, is watched over by providence only during the time when one thinks of God; providence withdraws from such a person during the time when one is occupied with something else . . . Hence it seems to me that all prophets and excellent persons seeking perfection (Ar., al-fudala‌ʾ al-kamilin) whom one of the evils of the world befell, had this evil happen to them during such a time of distraction or due to the vileness of the matter with which one was occupied . . . The providence of God, may He be exalted, is constantly (Ar., takun ʿinayat Allah da‌ʾiman) over those who have obtained this overflow, which is permitted to anyone who makes an effort with a view to obtaining it (Ar., li-kull man sa‌ʿa fi husulihi). If a person’s thought is free from distraction in apprehending (Ar., ʾidrakuhu) God, may He be exalted, in the right way and if there is joy in what one apprehends (Ar., wa-ghibtuhu bima ʾadraka), then that individual can never be afflicted with evil of any kind for, then, one is with God and God is with one (Ar., li-ʾannahu ma‌ʿa Allah wa-Allah ma‌ʿahu). (Guide 3:51; Pines 624–25)

It is important to note that, in this passage as in others, Maimonides includes not only the prophets and the patriarchs but also people who lead a philosophic-mystical life (Ar., al-fudala‌ʾ, al-kamilun); they, too, can attain to the state of continuous contemplation.20 20 At the end of the section dealing with the ability to be wholly turned toward God even when one is going about one’s daily business, Maimonides writes: “This is not a rank

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The climax of Maimonides’ teaching of continuous contemplation is to be found in his views on the ideal death and life-after-death which he describes as an unending form of continuous contemplation: Yet in the measure in which the faculties of the body are weakened and the fire of the desires is quenched, the intellect is strengthened (Ar., wa-qawiya al-ʿaql), its lights achieve wider extension (Ar., wa-ʾinbasatat ʾanwaruhu), its apprehension is purified, and it is in bliss (Ar., wa-taghbut) in what it apprehends. The result is that, when a person striving for perfection is stricken with years and approaches death, this apprehension increases very powerfully, bliss (Ar., al-ghibta) in this apprehension and passion (Ar., al-ʿishq) for the object of apprehension become stronger, until the soul is separated from the body, at that moment, into this state of pleasure (Ar., al-lidhdha). Because of this, the Sages have indicated with reference to the deaths of Moses, Aaron, and Miriam that the three of them died by a kiss . . . Their purpose was to indicate that the three of them died in the pleasure of this apprehension (Ar., fi hal lidhdhati dhalika al-ʾidrak) due to the intensity of .

that, with a view to the attainment of which, someone like myself may aspire for guidance. But one may aspire to attain that rank which was mentioned before this one through the training that we have described.” (Pines 624; Joel 460:4–6). In note 32, ad loc, Pines comments that the first sentence can be read in either of two ways: “Someone like myself cannot aspire to be guided with a view to achieving this rank” or “Someone like myself cannot aspire to guide others with a view to achieving this rank.” According to the first reading, the one Pines adopts, Maimonides says he cannot aspire to reach the level of the patriarchs who achieved the simultaneous consciousness of God and of this world and who, therefore, could prosper and preach the word of God. According to the second reading, Maimonides says he can reach such a state but he cannot guide others toward it. In either case, it is clear that one who leads the philosophic mystical life can achieve, or almost achieve, the level of the patriarchs which is the rank of “I sleep but my heart waketh.” This is a very important point because it makes clear that some form of almost prophetic consciousness in contemporary society is admitted by Maimonides. If we consider the possibility that the first reading is not Maimonides’ true teaching but expresses his inclination not to reveal his deepest teachings in accordance with the Talmudic injunctions (Talmud, Hagiga 13a), then the point is even stronger: that the well-educated and welltrained philosopher can become a mystic; that is, that he can be in direct contact with the divine as, indeed, did the prophets and patriarchs except that such a person can never reach the level of Moses and probably not the intensity of the patriarchs and biblical prophets. Philosophic mysticism is, thus, the reciprocal of prophecy. Both require rigorous preparation plus the consent of the divine to the emanation of pure spiritual-intellectual energy to the recipient. The discussion of Maimonides’ view of the renewal of prophecy in his own days is, therefore, on the wrong track. Maimonides differentiates between prophecy as a legal-dogmatic phenomenon and prophecy as an experiential-mystical phenomenon. The former cannot be renewed at all; legal prophecy is over. The latter, however, does not need to be “renewed” because it is always present, it being a function of the ongoing emanation of intellectual energy from the Tenth Intelligence without which the universe would cease to exist (MT, “Hilkhot Yesodei ha-Torah” 1:2). On the distinction between legaldogmatic and experiential-mystical prophecy, see D. Blumenthal, “IM.”

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the passion (Ar., min shiddat al-ʿishq) . . . the apprehension that is achieved in a state of intense passion for Him (Ar. ʿinda shiddati ʿishqihi ta‌ʿala) . . . As he [Solomon] said, “Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth” (Song 1:2), etc. . . . The sages mention this kind of death, which is, in true reality, salvation from death, only with regard to Moses, Aaron, and Miriam. The other prophets and excellent persons (Ar., al-fudala‌ʾ) are beneath this degree. However, it holds good for all of them that the apprehension of their intellects becomes stronger at the separation . . . After having reached this condition of enduring permanence (Ar. al-baqa‌ʾ al-da‌ʾim), such an intellect will remain in one and the same state (Ar., fi hal wahida), the impediment that veiled it having been removed. One’s state of permanence will be in that state of intense pleasure (Ar., wa-yakun baqa‌ʾuhu fi tilka al-lidhdha al-ʿazima) which does not belong to the genus of bodily pleasures. (Guide 3:51; Pines 627–28)21

In these passages on providence, the ideal death, and immortality, one should note yet again that Maimonides uses mystical terms and images. He describes the last moments of the life of the person who strives for perfection as pleasure (Ar., lidhdha) and writes about the strengthening of the intellect and the extension of its lights (Ar., wa-qawiya al-ʿaql wa-ʾinbasatat ʾanwaruhu). Most importantly, he introduces verses and images from the Song of Songs to describe the continuous intellectual contemplation of God (“I sleep but my heart wakes,” “Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth,” “My beloved knocks,” etc.).22 All these terms and images flow from mystical insight, not from metaphysical understanding. In his views on continuous contemplation, continuous providence, the ideal death, and the unending bliss of life-after-death, then, Maimonides set forth his true ideal for human existence. The telos of humanity, according to Maimonides, is not philosophy itself. Philosophy is a stage, an instrument, a means to the end. The end is continuous contemplation of God, continuous being-in-the-presence of God, even when one is conducting one’s daily business and especially as one approaches death. This is achieved by following the various stages of self-perfection: meticulous observance of the commandments, the hard work of studying and thinking about creation so that it leads to God, the pondering of one’s intellectual conclusions in the presence of the Divine, and the continuous being before 21 As noted above Ar., al-ghibta is properly translated “bliss” and I have modified Pines accordingly. On life in the world-to-come, see also Maimonides’ Commentary to the Mishna, Pereq Heleq and MT, “Hilkhot Teshuva” 8:1–2. For a closer linguistic analysis of these and other terms in Maimonides’ mystical vocabulary, see “PWM.” 22 See MT, “Hilkhot Teshuva” 10:3, that such images are intended to allude to such experiences.

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God even in daily activities and especially in death. Permanent pleasure in the Divine is the goal. A problem with the text of Guide 3:51: The text does not show clearly the three stages that I have outlined; rather, the text mixes the stages in what appears to be helter-skelter fashion. It requires work to separate out the levels from the text. Thus, the text does not follow a linear exposition of three stages. Thus, too, the love of God and the passion for God are juxtaposed in the same passages. And so on.23 There are probably two reasons for this. First, Maimonides is hiding something. Indeed, he says in the Introduction to the Guide that some thoughts will be consciously hidden from the reader. What, then, is it that he is trying to conceal here in 3:51, even as he reveals it at the same time? I think it is the teaching that the acquired intellect, not the rational soul, is the part of human consciousness that attains mortality. Maimonides teaches that the rational soul is a natural function of the body, much as the vegetative and animal souls are. The latter clearly die with the human body and, to tell the truth, so does the rational soul. It is, therefore, only the acquired intellect that survives humanity.24 Since, however, the words for soul in Hebrew, nefesh and neshama, are used in contexts that the rabbis understood to teach immortality and, since the term “acquired intellect” has no clear Hebrew designation, Maimonides did not want to teach openly that the rational soul dies with the body. So he concealed that doctrine, though it is there to see for whoever is bold enough to think that the rational soul dies with the body. This desire to preserve the Hebrew nefesh and neshama as the bearers of immortality is the first reason that led Maimonides to weave a complicated and unsystematic picture in 3:51.25 Second, the states Maimonides is trying to describe here in 3:51 and elsewhere are elusive; they are post-rational, post-cognitive, post-linguistic. He can only allude to them. Hence, he mixes the metaphors and images with the intellectualist vocabulary, yielding a mixed text. Other Passages Having established that, for Maimonides, metaphysics is a stage in selfperfection not an end in itself, it is possible to review other parts of his

23 Hannah Kasher has also pointed this out in a paper given at a conference in Tel Aviv (2004). 24 See Pereq Heleq and also MT, “Hilkhot Teshuva” 8:3. See also “PWM” and PM, chapter 1. 25 For more on Maimonides’ epistemology, see PM, Introduction.

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oeuvre to look for consistency of view. One such case is his theory of attributes; that is, his stance on the proper way to describe God. After many chapters dealing with biblical words and images, Maimonides devotes several chapters to the theory of attributes and culminates his exposition with the view that the best one can achieve is the systematic study of various attributes and the realization that they cannot be applied to God.26 Thus, God cannot be said to be “one” because God does not fall into the category of beings subject to quantity. God cannot even be said to “exist” because that word, too, implies being in time and space, a category that does not apply to God. This is Maimonides’ via negativa: God is categorically different from God’s creation and, hence, cannot be described. Realizing this as fully as possible—that is, systematically offering proofs of this—is the most humans can achieve. In the end, only silence is left to us. Everyone understands that one cannot achieve apprehension, within that which we are capable of apprehending, except by negation . . . that apprehension of Him is the inability to fully apprehend Him (Ar., ʾidrakuhu huwa al-ʿajz ʿan nihayat ʾidrakihi). All the philosophers say, “He blinded us with His beauty, and is veiled from us by the intensity of His manifestation” (Ar., ʾabharana bi-jamalihi wa-khafiya ʿanna li-shiddati zuhurihi)—as the sun is hidden for those who have sight because they are too weak to perceive it . . . The clearest thing of all that has been said in this matter is the word of the psalmist, “Silence is praise for you” (Ps. 65:2); meaning, silence for you is a form of praise . . . and his saying, “Speak in your hearts on your beds, and be silent” (Ps. 4:5). (Guide 1:59; Pines 139–40)

It could be that Maimonides’ meaning here is simple: Where negation is the only mode of thinking about the truth of God’s being, silence is the most befitting option. However, three elements in this short passage allude to more. First, the phrase “apprehension of Him is the inability to fully apprehend Him.” This phrase could simply mean that recognizing our inability to know God constitutes true knowledge of God. However, this phrase is more likely to be, I argue, one of those widely found paradoxical sayings that intend to allude to an experience which is, itself, post-cognitive.27 Second, the anonymous but seemingly widespread saying of the philosophers “He blinded28 us with His beauty, and is veiled from us by the

26 For more on this, see PM, chapter 1, and Josef Stern. 27 See Stern, Chapter 1. 28 The usual translation of this verb in passive form, while possible, seems to me to miss the point completely. I have, therefore, chosen the active form (with Friedländer, 215).

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intensity of His manifestation.” This phrase was quoted by Hoter ben Shelomo, presumably from Maimonides, but with the introductory words “The one inspired by the truth has said”29 and with the variant “by His perfection” (Ar. kamalihi, and not jamalihi).30 To the best of my knowledge, no one has discovered the source for this saying. The citations I have collected are all clearly from mystical, not philosophic, sources.31 The culmination of Maimonides’ theory of attributes, then, is being blinded by the beauty of God—a mystical, not a philosophic, image. This saying of the philosophers has parallels in Maimonides: “The truth was hidden from them completely, together with the intensity of His manifestation (Ar., wa-khafiya ʿanhum al-haqq jumlatan ma‌ʿa shiddat zuhurihi) (Guide Introduction; Pines 8) and “Exalted be He Whose perfection has blinded us” (Ar., fa-subhana man ’abharana kamaluhu) (Guide 1:72, end; Pines 193). The first quotation describes the utterly ignorant (“They know not, neither do they understand; they go about in darkness” Ps. 82:5). Philosophic as well as mystical truth eludes them.32 The second of these phrases comes at the end of Maimonides’ review of the usual theology of his day (Ar., kalam) that he finds woefully inadequate to describe God. The culmination of Maimonides’ survey of classic Islamic theology, then, is again being blinded by the perfection of God—a mystical, not a philosophic, image.33 29 Ar. qala al-muʾayyad bil-haqq. This is an Isma‌ʿili term, used in similar form for al-Shirazi, common in the Rasa‌ʾil Ikhwan al-Safa‌ʾ, and probably used by Hoter ben Shelomo, a fifteenth century Yemenite savant, of Maimonides as an honorific title—unless Hoter was quoting what he believed to be Maimonides’ source itself though he has not told us which al-muʾayyad he is talking about. See D. Blumenthal, The Philosophic Questions and Answers of Hoter ben Shelomo (Brill: Leiden, 1981) 145, n. 7. 30 See The Commentary of Hoter ben Shelomo to the Thirteen Principles of Maimonides (Brill: Leiden, 1974) 55, n. 7, for a discussion of the versions where I have noted that Hoter may have conflated this text with the parallel one from Guide 1:72. 31 Al-Ghazzali, Maqasid al-ʾAsna (Cairo edition) 86; Madkour, 59–60; Y. Marquet, La philosophie des Ikhwan al-Safa‌ʾ, 2 vol., unpublished dissertation, 1:5; al-Hujwiri cited in A. Schimmel, Mystical Dimensions of Islam (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1975) 6; Philo’s De Opficio Mundi, 23:71, cited in A. J. Heschel, The Prophets (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1962) 2:122; and Al-Ghazzali, Miʿyar al-ʿIlm, cited without reference in Y. Qafih, commentary to Guide 1:59 (1:147, n. 31). To all these references cited in The Commentary of Hoter ben Shelomo to the Thirteen Principles of Maimonides and The Philosophic Questions and Answers of Hoter ben Shelomo, add: V. Danner, Ibn ʿAta‌ʾillah’s Sufi Aphorisms (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1973) chapter 17, # 165 (page 47): “Only because of the intensity of His manifestation (Ar., li-shiddati zuhurihi) is He veiled, and only because of the sublimity of His light is He hidden from view.” Still, none of these is an exact source for either the version of Maimonides or that of Hoter. 32 The usual translation of “in spite of its intensity” seems, again, to miss the point. 33 See also: “. . . it behooves us . . . to aim at, and engage in, perfecting our knowledge of preparatory matters and in achieving those premises that purify apprehension of its taint,

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Third, Maimonides’ two quotations from Psalms recommending silence as the best praise for God. Here, too, this may just be good advice to the philosopher, but it may also be a phrase intended to allude to an experience of profound silence that is itself post-cognitive, profound silence being a common mystical state. These three phrases in Guide 1:59 all betray a mystical, not a metaphysical or logical, context; they allude, I argue, to a postphilosophic experience of the divine which is beyond verbal and conceptual silence. Guide 1:68, the chapter on the unity of the knower, the known, and mind, is yet another passage that, when read in the light of Guide 3:51, seems to take on a more mystical dimension. As noted above,34 1:68 could be read in a non-mystical way. But, it could also be read either as an epistemological prelude to a post-cognitive experience or, as a metaphor for mystical experience itself. In either of the last two cases, 1:68 is another passage that is best read, I argue, as alluding to a post-philosophic mysticism. The doctrines of prophecy, providence, and philosophic mysticism constitute yet another set of passages that can best be read in light of a common phenomenology. First, the preparation for all is the same: meticulous observance of the commandments, ethical purification, intellectual study of the sciences and metaphysics and, finally, placing oneself in the Presence of God. Second, the process itself is the same: a permitted (willed) emanation of energy from the Agent Intelligence to the human faculties of the prepared recipient; a “contact” (ʾittisal) between the divine and the human on the level of the divine and human intellects. Third, all three are in proportion to philosophic preparation; all three protect the recipient; all three are signs of grace. However, as I have noted,35 in spite of the interrelatedness of these phenomena, there are two differences between prophecy and mysticism: (1) Prophecy is initiated by God, though only to one who is prepared, while mysticism is initiated by humans, though only if one is properly prepared. And (2), prophecy can be (but is not always) definitive legally; mystical experience can never be appealed to for legal decisionmaking. The differences notwithstanding, these three major doctrines are best read in light of one another. Including philosophic mysticism in this common phenomenology vastly expands the scope and consistency of Maimonides’ teaching.

which is error. It [apprehension] will, then, go forward to look upon the holy, divine Presence” (Ar., bi-lahz al-hudra al-qudusiyya al-ʾilahiyya) (Guide 1:5; Pines 30). 34 See PM, Chapter 1 and Chapter 4. 35 See “IM.”

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The various passages referring to lightning as a metaphor for intellectually based enlightenment36 may also constitute a key to an integrated view of Maimonides’ teaching on true spirituality. In each case, the phenomenon described by lightning is rooted in intellectuality but constitutes an enlightenment that is more than just the culmination of a sequence of logically proven thoughts. The image always describes an awareness that is preceded by cognition but is itself post-cognitive (or, in the case of prophecy, pre-cognitive). The experience described by the image of lightning, however, varies in intensity and duration—as do prophecy, providence, and mysticism—thus offering additional evidence of the integrated nature of the phenomena it is used to describe. It seems to me that, as scholars begin to use the tool of philosophic mysticism to understand Maimonides, they will discover other passages that will prove Maimonides to have been quite consistent in his teaching on the nature of the true spiritual life, even though he was very reticent in his presentation of that teaching. On Maimonides’ Sources I do not know the origin of the mystical terms Maimonides uses in Guide 3:51, nor of the phrases and images he uses elsewhere. There seem to be three possibilities: that they are drawn from the tradition of philosophic mysticism of Ibn Sina, al-Farabi, and others for whom intense religiousintellectual experience was the telos of humanity; that they are of sufi origin, perhaps through the influence of his family and milieu; and that Maimonides himself fused these terms with his own particular meaning as the most mature form of his lifetime of reflection on these matters. Each of these will be examined separately though I rather prefer the last suggestion. In any case, modern scholars will have to change their conception of medieval rationalism to include the spiritual-experiential dimension of philosophic mysticism within the very definition of the purpose of philosophy.

36 See PM, Chapter 4.

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Sarah Stroumsa,37 Steven Harvey,38 Kenneth Seeskin,39 Josef Stern,40 and Gideon Freudenthal41 have restated the position of classical Wissenschaft thinking most clearly:42 Maimonides demythologized the world to come, messianism, resurrection, revelation, prophecy, providence, creation— indeed, all the major rabbinic doctrines—and constructed a system in which intellect alone is the measure of perfection and, hence, the telos of humanity. True felicity is a function of intellectualization. Lidhdha is the state of permanent, abstract, intellectual bliss that is true worship; normative prayer is merely a training ground for intellectual worship. There are no traces of sufi ecstatic experiences in Maimonides. Harvey has even argued that the Yemenites and other Easterners were struck by the presence of the sufi term ʿishq but, since they were cut off from the philosophic traditions of the West, they imbued Maimonides with a foreign meaning which was the opposite of the non-ecstatic, rationalist, true reading of the West.43 Schwartz44 has criticized this classical position noting that Maimonides does not have any systematic discussion of the soul, immortality, or happiness, as does Avicenna. Indeed, a reading of the original texts of al-Risala fi al-ʿIshq and of al-Risala fi Mahiyyat al-Salat45 shows that the ideas and the terminology used by Avicenna are not at all present in Maimonides. Thus, chapter one of al-Risala fi Mahiyyat al-Salat is devoted to a long discussion of different types of souls, a subject only adumbrated by Maimonides. It also contains a definition of the resurrection, a subject avoided by Maimonides. And it states that the goal of prayer is uninterrupted submission to God, a definition not shared by Maimonides. Chapter two discusses the difference between legislated and true prayer, a position not far from Maimonides’, but it continues by defining true prayer as mystical knowledge of God (ʿirfan Allah) and being intimate with God (yunaji rabbahu)—both terms conspicuously missing in Maimonides. Chapter three on life after death bears no resemblance in terminology or construct to Maimonides. Thus, too, Avicenna’s al-Risala fi al-ʿIshq has long sections on the types of souls,

37 S. Stroumsa, “True Felicity.” 38 S. Harvey, “The Meaning of Terms.” 39 K. Seeskin, “Sanctity and Silence.” 40 See PM, Chapter 1. 41 See PM, Chapter 1. 42 See, for instance, Pines, Strauss, Vajda, Altmann, and others. See also I. Madkour, La Place d’Alfarabi. 43 S. Harvey, “The Meaning of the Terms,” 188–91. 44 D. Schwartz, “Avicenna and Maimonides on Immortality.” 45 Mehren, Traités mystiques and J. N. Bell, “Avicenna’s Treatise on Love.”

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a long discussion of ʿishq (passionate love), of shawq (yearning), and even includes the famous passages about the love of beautiful human faces, of the difference between kissing and embracing, the paean to dying a chaste person, and the gazing on the beardless faces of youths as a witness to divine beauty—ideas that could not have been further from Maimonides’ worldview. Lobel, too,46 criticizes the classic Wissenschaft view stating that: “Ultimately, Maimonides’ God is not the Prime Mover of Aristotle but the unknowable Plotinian One, who cannot be adequately represented in speech.” All speech about God is by tasamuh, poetic license that allows one to use words loosely. Kellner, too,47 alludes to religious language that is post-philosophical. There can be no doubt that Maimonides did follow the Islamic philosophic, intellectualist tradition in several matters: in his method of negation which culminates in silence as the only epistemologically sound way to talk about God; in his identification of the divine as paradoxically knowner, known, and mind; and in his subsequent interpretation, in a philosophic way, of the doctrines of prophecy, revelation, creation, reward and punishment, practical mitsvot, etc. However, he did not form his oeuvre using the systematic style and typical terms of the classical Islamic philosophers. Maimonides’ definition of intellectual worship followed the same path. It was philosophic in content but he did not teach these topics using the same categories and terms that others used; rather, he consciously introduced terms that were sufi in origin. Maimonides was, thus, not completely within the philosophic mystical tradition of the Islamic world. The most one could say is that he was a philosopher who used mystical vocabulary to point to that which is beyond philosophy. The argument for sufi influence is particularly tempting. Maimonides’ father-in-law was a known sufi;48 his wife may have been one too;49 there were known Jewish sufis in his entourage;50 his son was under sufi influence;51 and the school that developed under R. Abraham was certainly

46 D. Lobel, “Silence,” esp. 27 and 37–39. 47 M. Kellner, “Is Maimonides’ Ideal Person.” 48 S. D. Goitein, “Chief Judge R. Hananʾel b. Samuel, In-Law of R. Moses Maimonides,” Tarbiz Jubilee Volume 50 (1980–81): 371–95, cited in P. Fenton, “Commentary on the Haftarot,” 29. See also, P. Fenton, “More on Rabbi Hananʾel.” 49 S. D. Goitein, A Mediterranean Society, 482–83. 50 P. Fenton, “More on Rabbi Hananʾel,” 81; P. Fenton, “A Mystical Treatise on Prayer,” 141 and his Deux traités, 36. 51  G. Cohen, “The Soteriology”; S. D. Goitein, “Abraham Maimonides”; P. Fenton, “A Mystical Treatise on Prayer”; etc.

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under sufi influence.52 Indeed, in his Mishne Torah in Hilkhot Nezirut 10:15, Maimonides argues precisely for such pietistic living in spite of its not being a life led according to the golden mean as he requires elsewhere:53 But he who vows to God in the way of holiness—this is pleasing and praiseworthy. Concerning this it was said, “The laurel (Heb., nezer) of his God is upon his head . . . he is holy unto the Lord” (Num. 6:4–5). And Scripture has accounted him as equal to the prophet, as it says, “I shall cause prophets to arise from your children, and nazirites from your young men” (Amos 2:11).

Again, in his Mishne Torah in Hilkhot Shemitta ve-Yovel 13:12–13, Maimonides makes an argument for intensely religious living: Why did [the tribe of] Levi not merit an inheritance in the land of Israel and a share in the spoils of war together with its brothers? Because it was set aside to worship God, to teach His direct ways and His righteous judgments to the public . . . Therefore, they were set aside from the ways of the world: they did not wage war like the rest of Israel and they did not inherit the land . . . Rather, they are the army of the Lord, as it says . . .  The tribe of Levi is not alone [in this]. Rather, every single person of those who live in the world, whose spirit has gratefully welled up, and who has comprehended in his or her mind to be separated and to stand before God, to serve Him, to worship Him, and to know Him; who has walked in the straight path that God has intended for her or him; and who has shed from his or her neck the yoke of the many accountings that humans make [of one another]—this person has become holy [like] the holy of holies, and God will be her or his portion and inheritance forever and ever. Such a person will have sufficient in this world, as did the priests and levites, as David, may he rest in peace, said, “The Lord is my portion of inheritance and my cup; You sustain my destiny” (Ps. 16:5).

Still, one cannot say that Maimonides was a sufi; his worldview and vocabulary were not the same. Maimonides did not advocate sufi asceticism. He did not teach antinomianism (or better phrased, transnomianism). He did not dwell upon the themes of love, passion, desire, etc. He did not advocate specific ritual practices of sufi influence, even those his son introduced in the next generation. And so on. The most one could say is that Maimonides was a philosophic mystic who used sufi vocabulary, an

52 P. Fenton, Deux traités, Introduction, for a long list of sufi influences in ideas, terminology, and practice. See also P. Fenton, “La hitbodedut,” and “Solitary Meditation” for sufi-colored intellectualist meditation techniques. 53 Y. Levinger, “On the Reason for Nezirut,” and I. Twersky, Introduction to the Code of Maimonides (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980) 467–68. See also Commentary to the Mishna, “Shemonah Peraqim,” ch. 4 and Mishne Torah, Hilkhot Deʾot 1:5.

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intellectualist mystic who provided a space within rabbinic, rationalist, halakhic Judaism for persons with intense spiritual practice. The answer to the question of Maimonides’ relation to his sources may lie somewhere between seeing Maimonides as an Alfarabian-Avicennian and seeing him as a sufi. In a methodologically very important book, Lobel54 has pointed out that Halevi took terms that were in the Islamic environment and transformed those terms by applying them in a rather strict rabbinic framework of thought. Thus, she argues, Halevi transformed such terms as ʾittisāl, ʾittihād, ʾijtihād, mushahāda, ta‌ʾyīd, ʾilhām, wahy, nubuwwa, al-ʾamr, hulūl, mahall, and others to give them specific Jewish meanings.55 She particularly noted that Halevi associates ladhdha and ʾittisāl as follows: “Halevi’s language of union does not mean that he regards ʾittisāl as ontological oneness or unio mystica as do the most radical Sufis. On the other hand, his pairing of the term ʾittisāl with ladhda does add an ecstatic, passionate dimension to the divine-human relationship.”56 Lobel’s argument is best summarized as follows:57 We have seen that he never mentions the Sufis by name, that the Sufi is the absent interlocutor in the dialogue, whose presence is evoked only through characteristic terms and themes. These terms and themes are at the heart of the dialogue, however. . . . The fact that the Sufi is absent as an opponent shows to what extent Ha-Levi has internalized and identified with certain Sufi spiritual ideas. Ha-Levi appropriates Sufi terminology to describe Jewish religious experience, while denying certain ideas . . . Ha-Levi brings a new texture to the idea by creatively appropriating the potent language of Sufi spirituality.

The same may be true of Maimonides. First, he built a comprehensive system of Jewish law which set the boundaries of Jewish practice and belief. In doing this, he put the particularity and details of Jewish life at the core of his work. Then, he built an intellectualist scientific and philosophic system rooted largely in Aristotle though drawing on Alfarabi and others.58 In this, he reached out to the world of universal knowledge and truth. Finally, perhaps on the basis of his own personal religious experience, he added a spiritual teaching that used sufi-like terms, in their 54 D. Lobel, Between Mysticism and Philosophy, especially 5 and 161. 55 Lobel, Between Mysticism and Philosophy, 22–28, 41, 66–67, 90–100, 127–39. For al-ʾamr and hulūl / mahall, see Lobel, “Dwelling,” 117–21 and 106–16. 56 Lobel, Between Mysticism and Philosophy, 153. 57 Lobel, Between Mysticism and Philosophy, 159, 161. 58 See J. Kraemer, “The Islamic Context of Medieval Jewish Philosophy” and “Maimonides and the Spanish Aristotelian School” for the depth of this influence.

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non-technical sense, transforming those terms to serve his own purposes. Maimonides, thus, did not “borrow”; rather, he re-worked the scientific and philosophic concepts, as well as the mystical terms and images, of his milieu into a whole to make them fully continuous, and compatible, with the particulars of the rabbinic tradition which had always been his main concern. The result was a harmonious structure of enormous proportions and remarkable consistency, from its smallest legal details to its guidance on the matter of contemplative worship.59 Conclusions Maimonides did not have an esoteric and an exoteric teaching. Rather, he had one teaching that he presented on many levels, according to the comprehension of his widely diversified readers. This is true of his teaching on the true spiritual life, too. In Maimonides’ teaching on the true spiritual life, there are three levels of spiritual life after the initial level of meticulous observance of the commandments: (1) intellectual apprehension of God, also called “love” of God—this involves long and tedious intellectual work to get to know creation and the rational energy behind it; (2) intellectual contemplation of God, also called “worship” of God and “passion” for God—this entails pondering the results of intellectual apprehension while in the sensed presence of God; and (3) continuous contemplation of God, characterized by such words as “always” and “intense pleasure”—this comprises sustained being-in-the-presence of God even while one is going about one’s daily business and especially when one is about to die. This hierarchy of the spiritual life shows beyond all doubt that, for Maimonides, metaphysics was only the penultimate stage in spiritual development; that rational work was only the bridge to a more spiritual stage of living; and that it was this sustained being-in-the-presence of God after intellectual effort that was the raison d’être of humanity. To make this point, Maimonides used terms that come from a mystical milieu, images that allude to mystical states and, with them, he constructed a teaching that leads toward such a state. Put simply: for Maimonides, philosophy was the handmaiden of mysticism.

59 I am told that there is an example of the integration of Islamic concepts and praxis in the issue of bankruptcy. If I understand correctly, there is no such concept in talmudic law though it did exist in Islamic law. Maimonides took the obviously useful concept and integrated it into Jewish law, making it continuous with talmudic thinking.

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Other passages in Maimonides’ work point to the same teaching, particularly Maimonides’ instruction on: silence and the dazzling presence of God; the unity of the knower, the known, and mind; the phenomenological integration of the teachings on prophecy, providence, and true worship; and the recurrent image of lightning. Put simply: for Maimonides, there is an all-encompassing worldview that sees the life of ritual and intellectual discipline culminate in philosophic mysticism. Finally, Maimonides’ thought is fully rooted in the Islamic rationalist philosophic tradition. However, in Guide 3:51 and elsewhere, he consciously chose to use terms of sufi origin to allude to the post-rational experiential reality which constituted the core and ultimate end of his religious teaching. In doing so, Maimonides transformed the concepts, terms, and images of his Islamic milieu to form a larger specifically Jewish synthesis, integrating the new into continuity with the old. Selected Bibliography Abrahamov, B. Divine Love in Islamic Mysticism: The Teachings of Al-Ghazali and AlDabbagh. London: Routledge Curzon, 2003. Altmann, A. “Das Verhältnis Maimunis zur jüdischen Mystik,” Monatschrift für Wissenschaft des Judentums 80 (1936): 305–30. Avicenna. See Ibn Sina. Bell, J. N. “Avicenna’s Treatise on Love and Nonphilosophical Muslim Tradition,” Der Islam 63 (1986): 73–89. Blidstein, G. “Joy in Maimonides’ Ethical Teaching” (Hebrew), Eshel Beer Sheva 2 (1980): 145–63. Blumenthal, D. website: . ——. “Maimonides’ Intellectualist Mysticism and the Superiority of the Prophecy of Moses,” Studies in Medieval Culture 10 (1977): 51–68. Reprinted in Approaches to the Study of Judaism in Medieval Times, edited by D. Blumenthal, 27–52. Chico: Scholars Press, 1984. Reprinted in Philosophic Mysticism: Studies in Rational Religion, Chapter 3. Ramat Gan: Bar Ilan University Press, 2006. Available on my website. ——. “On the Study of Philosophic Mysticism.” In History of Judaism: The Next Ten Years, edited by B. Bokser. Brown Judaic Studies. Chico: Scholars Press, 1980. Reprinted in Philosophic Mysticism: Studies in Rational Religion, Chapter 3. Ramat Gan: Bar Ilan University Press, 2006. ——. “Was There an Eastern Tradition of Maimonidean Scholarship?” Revue des études juives, 128 (1979): 57–68. Reprinted and expanded in The Philosophic Questions and Answers of Hoter ben Shelomo, 32–41. Leiden: Brill, 1981. ——. “An Illustration of the Concept ‘Philosophic Mysticism’ from Fifteenth Century Yemen.” In Hommage à Georges Vajda: Etudes d’histoire et de pensée juive, edited by G. Nahon, et al., 219–308. Louvain: Peeters, 1980. Reprinted and expanded in The Philosophic Questions and Answers of Hoter ben Shelomo, 55–72. Leiden: Brill, 1981. Reprinted in Philosophic Mysticism: Studies in Rational Religion, Chapter 8. Ramat Gan: Bar Ilan University Press, 2006. ——. “A Philosophical‑Mystical Interpretation of a Shiʾur Qomah Text.” In Studies in Jewish Mysticism, edited by J. Dan, 153–71. Cambridge, Mass.: Association for Jewish Studies,

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1982. Reprinted in The Philosophic Questions and Answers of Hoter ben Shelomo, 83–92. Leiden: Brill, 1981. Reprinted in Philosophic Mysticism: Studies in Rational Religion, Chapter 9. Ramat Gan: Bar Ilan University Press, 2006. ——. “Maimonides: Prayer, Worship, and Mysticism.” In Priere, Mystique, et Judaisme, edited by R. Goetschel, 89–106. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1987. Reprinted in Approaches to Judaism in Medieval Times, edited by D. Blumenthal, 1–16. Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1988. Reprinted in Philosophic Mysticism: Studies in Rational Religion, Chapter 4. Ramat Gan: Bar Ilan University Press, 2006. Available on my website—hereinafter: “PWM.” ——. Facing the Abusing God: A Theology of Protest. Louisville, KY: Westminster / John Knox, 1993. ——. “Philosophic Mysticism: The Ultimate Goal of Medieval Judaism.” In Esoteric and Exoteric Aspects in Judeo-Arabic Culture, edited by B. Hary and H. Ben-Shammai, 1–18. Leiden: Brill, 2006. Reprinted in Philosophic Mysticism: Essays in Rational Religion, Chapter 5. Ramat Gan: Bar Ilan University Press, 2005. Available on my website. ——. Philosophic Mysticism: Studies in Rational Religion. Ramat Gan: Bar Ilan University Press, 2006; hereinafter: “PM”. Chitriq, A. “The Guide for the Perplexed in the Light of Habad Hasidism,” Or Ha-Mizrah 32 (1972): 38–43. Cohen, G. “The Soteriology of Rabbi Abraham Maimuni,” Proceedings of the American Academy of Jewish Research 35 (1967): 765–98 and 36 (1968): 33–56. Dienstag, Y. Maimonides in the Light of the Scholars of Kabbalah (Hebrew). New York: World Jewish Congress, 1958. ——. “The Guide for the Perplexed and the Book of Knowledge in Hasidic Literature” (Hebrew). In The Abraham Weiss Jubilee Volume, 307–30. New York: 1964. Fackenheim, E. “A Treatise of Love by Ibn Sina,” Medieval Studies 7 (1945): 208–28. Fenton, P. The Treatise of the Pool. London: Octagon Press, 1981. French translation in idem., Deux traités de mystique juive. ——. “Some Judaeo-Arabic Fragments by Rabbi Abraham He-Hasid, the Jewish Sufi,” Journal of Semitic Studies 26 (1981): 47–72. ——. “More on Rabbi Hananel, the Master of the Hasidim” (Hebrew), Tarbiz 55 (1986): 77–107. ——. Al-Murshid ila al-Tafarrud. Jerusalem: Mekizei Nirdamim, 1987. French translation in idem., Deux traités de mystique juive. ——. Deux traités de mystique juive. Paris: Verdier, 1987. ——. “La ‘Hitbodedut’ chez les premiers Qabbalistes en Orient et chez les Soufis.” In Priere, Mystique, et Judaisme, edited by R. Goetschel, 133–58. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1987. ——. “Deux traités musulmans d’amour mystique en transmission judéo-arabe,” Arabica 37 (1990): 47–55. ——. “A Judeo-Arabic Commentary on the Haftarot by Hananʾel ben Shmuʾel, Abraham Maimonides’ Father-in-Law,” Maimonidean Studies 1 (1990): 27–56. ——. “La hierachie des saints dans la mystique juive et dans la mystique islamique.” In Alei Shefer: Studies in Literature and Jewish Thought Presented to Rabbi Dr. Alexanre Safran, edited by M. Hallamish, 49*–73*. Tel Aviv: Bar Ilan University Press, 1990. English version: “The Hierarchy of the Saints in Jewish and Islamic Mysticism,” Journal of the Muhyiddin Ibn Arabi Society 10 (1991): 12–33. ——. “ ‘La tête entre les genoux’: Contribution à l’étude d’une posture méditative dans la mystique juive et islamique,” Revue d’histoire et de philosophie religieuses 72 (1992): 413–26. ——. “A Mystical Treatise on Prayer and the Spiritual Quest from the Pietist Circle,” Jerusalem Studies in Arabic and Islam 16 (1993): 137–75. ——. “A Mystical Treatise on Perfection, Providence, and Prophecy from the Jewish Sufi Circle.” In The Jews of Medieval Islam, edited by D. Frank, 301–334. Leiden: Brill, 1995.

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——. “Solitary Meditation in Jewish and Islamic Mysticism in the Light of a Recent Archaelogical Discovery,” Medieval Encounters 1/2 (1995): 271–96. ——. “New Light on R. Abraham Maimonides’ Doctrine of Mystical Experience” (Hebrew), Daat 50/52 (2003): 107–19. Fox, M. “Prayer in Maimonides’ Thought” (Hebrew). In Jewish Prayer: Continuity and Innovation (Hebrew), 142–67. Tel Aviv: Bar Ilan University, 1978. English translation in Prayer in Judaism, edited by G. Cohn and H. Fisch, 119–41. Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson, 1996. Goitein, S. D. “A Jewish Addict to Sufism,” Jewish Quarterly Review 44 (1953): 37–49. ——. “Abraham Maimonides and his Pietist Circle.” In Jewish Medieval and Renaissance Studies, edited by A. Altmann, 145–64. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1967. ——. A Mediterranean Society, vol. v. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1988. Goldman, E. “The Special Worship of Those Who Perceive the Truth: Exegetical Notes to The Guide for the Perplexed, III: 51–54” (Hebrew), Bar Ilan Annual 6 (1968): 287–313. Harris, J. “The Image of Maimonides in Nineteenth-Century Jewish Historiography,” Proceedings of the American Academy for Jewish Research 54 (1987): 117–39. Harvey, S. “The Meaning of Terms Designating Love in Judaeo-Arabic Thought and Some Remarks on the Judaeo-Arabic Interpretation of Maimonides.” In Judaeo-Arabic Studies, edited by N. Golb, 175–96. Amsterdam: Harwood Academic Publications, 1997. Harvey, W. Z. “The Return of Maimonideanism,” Jewish Social Studies 42 (1980): 249–68. Heschel, A. J. Maimonides: Eine Biographie. Berlin: Erich Reiss Verlag, 1935. French translation. Paris: Payot, 1936. English translation. New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1982. Ibn Sina. See Mehren, Fackenheim, Sabri. Idel, M. The Mystical Experience in Abraham Abulafia. Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1988. ——. Maïmonide et la mystique juive. Paris: Les éditions du Cerf, 1991. Jacobs, L. Hasidic Prayer. New York: Schocken, 1975. Kaplan, L. “ ‘I Sleep But My Heart Waketh’: Maimonides’ Conception of Human Perfection.” In The Thought of Maimonides, edited by I. Robinson, et al., 130–66. Lewiston: Edward Mellen, 1990. Kasher, H. “The Myth of the Angry God in the Guide for the Perplexed” (Hebrew). In Myth in Judaism, edited by H. Pedayah, 95–111. Beer Sheva: Ben Gurion University Press, 1996. Keller, C.-A. “Die Religion der Gebildeten in Mittelalters: Averroes und Maimonides.” In Die Religion von Oberschichten, edited by P. Antes u. D. Pahnke, 35–51. Marburg: diagonal-Verlag, 1989. Kellner, M. “Philosophical Mysogyny in Medieval Jewish Thought: Gersonides and Maimonides” (Hebrew). In Y. Sermonetta Memorial Volulme, edited by A. Ravitzky, 113–28. Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1998. ——. “Is Maimonides’ Ideal Person Austerely Rationalist,” American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 76:1 (2002): 125–43. Kraemer, J., “Maimonides and the Spanish Aristotelian School,” Christians, Muslims, and Jews in Medieval and Early Modern Spain, ed. M. Meyerson and E. English (Notre Dame, IN, University of Notre Dame Press: 1999) 40–68. ——. “The Islamic Context of Medieval Jewish Philosophy.” In Cambridge Companion to Medieval Jewish Philosophy, edited by D. Frank and O. Leaman, 38–68. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Kreisel, H. “The Love and Fear of God in Maimonides’ Teaching” (Hebrew), Daat 37 (1996): 127–51. Levinger, Y. “On the Reason for Nezirut in the Guide for the Perplexed” (Hebrew), Bar Ilan Annual 4/5 (1955–56): 299–305. Lobel, D. Between Mysticism and Philosophy: Sufi Language of Religious Experience in Judah Ha-Levi’s Kuzari. Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2000. ——. “ ‘Silence is Praise to You’: Maimonides on Negative Theology, Looseness of Expression, and Religious Experience,” American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 76:1 (2002): 25–49.

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Madkour, I. La Place d’Alfarabi dans l’ecole philosophique musulmane. Paris: Adrien‑Maisonneuve, 1934. Margulies, R. “Maimonides and the Zohar” (Hebrew), Sinai 32: 263–74. Melamed, A. “Maimonides on Women: Formless Matter or Potential Prophet.” In Perpsectives on Jewish Thought and Mysticism, edited by E. Wolfson, 99–134. Amsterdam: Harwood Academic Press, 1998. Merhren, M.A.F. Traités Mystiques d’Abou Ali al-Hosain b. Abdallah b. Sina. III fascicule. Leiden: Brill, 1894. Pines, S. The Guide for the Perplexed. Chicago: University of Chicago, 1963. Rosenblatt, S. The High Way to Perfection, vol. 1. New York: Columbia University Press, 1927. Vol. 2 Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins Press, 1938. Rothschild, J. “En quel sense l’histoire de la philosophie juive reconnaît l’existence d’une ‘mystique philosophique’ dans le moyen âge occidentale.” In Expérience et écriture mystique dans les religions du livre, edited by P. Fenton and R. Goetschel, 113–29. Leiden: Brill, 2000. Sabri, T. “Risala fi l’ʿisq: Le traité sur l’amour d’Avicenne, traduction et étude,” Revue des études islamiques 58 (1990) 109–34 and 61/61 (1993–94) 175–217. Scholem, G. “From Researcher to Kabbalist” (Hebrew), Tarbiz 6:3 (1935): 90–8. Schwartz, D. “Avicenna and Maimonides on Immutability: A Comparative Study.” In Medieval and Modern Perspectives on Muslim-Jewish Relations, edited by R. Nettler, 185–97. Amsterdam: Harwood Academic Publications, 1995. Schwartz, M. Maimonides’ Guide for the Perplexed (Hebrew translation and commentary), 2 vols. Tel Aviv: Tel Aviv University Press, 2002. Seeskin, K., “Sanctity and Silence: The Religious Significance of Maimonides’ Negative Theology,” American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 76:1 (2002) 7–24. Stern, J. “Maimonides’ Demonstrations: Principles and Practice,” Medieval Philosophy and Theology 10 (2001): 47–84. ——. “Maimonides on the Growth of Knowledge and the Limitations of the Intellect.” In Maïmonide: perspective arabe, hébraique, latine, edited by T. Levy, 1–47. Louvain: Peeters, 2004. Stroumsa, S. “ ‘True Felicity’: Paradise in the Thought of Avicenna and Maimonides,” Medieval Encounters 4:1 (1998): 51–77. Sviri, S. The Taste of Hidden Things. Inverness, CA: The Golden Sufi Center, 1997. Twersky, I. Introduction to the Code of Maimonides. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980. Vajda, G. La théologie ascetique de Bahya ibn Paquda, Cahiers de la Société Asiatique. Paris: Imprimérie Nationale, 1947. ——. L’amour de Dieu dans la théologie juive du moyen âge. Paris: Vrin, 1957.

INTERVIEW WITH DAVID r. BLUMENTHAL September 2, 2012 Hava Tirosh-Samuelson and Aaron W. Hughes David, we normally begin the interviews for the Library of Contemporary Jewish Philosophers asking the philosopher to talk about him- or herself. You are quite exceptional in that you have written about yourself most openly. Let me begin the interview by reading a paragraph from your book, The Banality of Good and Evil, in which you say the following: I am a Jew, a Rabbi, and the son of a Rabbi with a family and serious community commitments. As such, my involvement with the shoah is central to my identity. Though, it is not the whole thereof. I am a professor, well-trained in academic discourse, intellectually curious about other disciplines and an experienced teacher and writer. I’m also a religious person with a strong appreciation for the spiritual dimension of life and with a dedication which grows out of that spirituality and whatever life has taught me. And it always flows from Jewish sources and situations, though it takes into account the multifaceted nature of my setting and my interests. In addition, I’m male, middle-aged, heterosexual, married, and a father of three sons. I try to be inclusive and multicultural in my thinking, action, teaching and writing, though I make an effort not to represent the views of others.

I don’t think that anybody else has written such a succinct self-definition. Could you tell us a little bit more about your intellectual trajectory? How did you become a rabbi, a professor, a community leader, and a public intellectual? First, let me give credit where credit is due. It was our students in the feminist movement who really brought to my attention, indeed, to everyone’s attention, the fact that one must self-identify. You are who you are, and you owe it to your readers to say all of that up front. And I’m glad I did that. I had at one point a wonderful student who was gay. And he said to me, “You know, you need to self-identify as heterosexual as well.” And I thought, “Well, that’s correct. I’m not ashamed of that self-identification.” So, it’s really from my students that I learned that we have to do that. And, you’re right, I do try to do that wherever I am.

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I don’t think that I actually chose a trajectory as such. My father, Aaron H. Blumenthal, was a Conservative rabbi, as you well know, and he was, I must say, a rather important Conservative rabbi. He is the one who wrote that famous teshuvah (responsum) allowing women to be called up to the Torah. It was issued in 1954, the same year as the great desegregation decision in the United States Supreme Court. My father loved scholarship, as such, although he was not a trained scholar. And he was thrilled when I eventually went into academia, although I too was ordained as a Conservative rabbi and served as a congregational rabbi for four years. So I was following in his footsteps all the way through school. I went to college at the University of Pennsylvania during the 1950s at a time when men (indeed, there were practically no women in academia) were legends in their own lifetimes. I studied with the giants of biblical studies and Jewish studies, among them Ephraim Speiser, Moshe Greenberg, Solomon Dov Goitein, and Yehezkel Kutscher. These were my teachers who introduced me to the academic study of Judaism and to the scholarly life more generally. So, I moved into a scholarly environment very, very early in my academic training. This was no mean feat since these scholars were outstanding. For example, Speiser was the editor of the Anchor Bible so that the work we did in his seminar eventually became incorporated into the Anchor Bible translation. I remember attending that seminar as a sophomore or maybe a senior in college. After graduating from the University of Pennsylvania I went to the Jewish Theological Seminary and was one of the three last people to go through the accelerated four-year scholarly program. Everybody else after that went for five and six years for the rabbinic program. And again I studied with men who were legends in their lifetime because their scholarship established the academic field of Jewish studies. I refer to Saul Lieberman, Salo Baron, and Shalom Spiegel, who was a great role model for me as a person, a man with an extraordinary poetic sense and prophetic sense. I didn’t study with Abraham Joshua Heschel, but I did read Heschel’s works while I was at JTS. When I finished the Seminary I was an ordained rabbi and I went into the rabbinate to function as a congregational rabbi. In truth, I was tired of studying. I served as a rabbi for four years, met my wife, Ursula Noether, while I was there, and we got married. But at the end of four years, I decided that I’d like to go back into something more intellectual. The rabbinate is not an intellectual endeavor. It’s very much a pastoral endeavor, and I was good at it. But I really wanted to do something more intellectual. My wife’s family had something to do with the decision. You may not know it, but my wife’s family, the Noethers, generated several outstanding scholars. The

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most famous woman mathematician in all of history, Emmy Noether, is an ancestor of my wife and my wife’s grandfather, Paul Noether, had been on the faculty of Freiburg in pharmacology, and had been thrown off the faculty by none less than Heidegger himself. My father-in-law was in business, but he was glad to see the academic reigns picked up once more in the family. So, in effect, he supported us while I did my doctoral work, including the final two years when I studied in Paris, as you know, with Georges Vajda. He was another intellectual giant that shaped my career. When he died in 1973 I wrote the obituary for the Association of Jewish Studies in which I noted that it took fourteen of us to replace him when he died. I listed all of us by name in the very first footnote. So I started my life as an academic intellectual, which turned into an academic career in the course of time, by encountering and studying with intellectual giants. In my first tenure-track academic position at Brown University I had the fortune of working with yet another intellectual giant, Jacob Neusner. He was a very explorative intellectual figure who was not afraid to make mistakes in the pursuit of knowledge. He has one of the most creative minds in the construction of Jewish history and in the analysis of Jewish historical sources. After a few years at Brown I came to Emory University, and here I had a revelation of sorts. I found out that in fact I didn’t have to write about other people’s philosophy and theology, which is what I had done for my doctorate. Up to that point what all scholars of Jewish philosophy did was to write about somebody else’s thought. But when I got to Emory and was introduced to the Candler School of Theology and the Graduate Division of Religion I encountered a totally different way of doing theology and philosophy. Here I was taught that I needed to take a stand on something, write about it, and be prepared to argue for it and to defend it. And I realized that I could do precisely that. Thus started the fourth stage of my intellectual development, a stage in which I tried to write some kind of contemporary Jewish response to two main problems: God and the Holocaust, and humanity and the Holocaust. In a nutshell, that is pretty much where I am today and how I got here. I think that from early childhood I’ve shown a kind of spiritual sensitivity. It was an interest in living with God or living in God’s presence. You know, religious or spiritual sensitivity is very much like music. Some people have musical sensitivity and others do not; some are more musical than others. By the same token, I have always had a personal connection with the living God. And so I’ve retained that motif throughout everything that I’ve done. Even when I am doing pure academic work, the question that

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motivates me is: What was the religious experience behind the texts at my disposal. In that sense of the word, Heschel was very, very important. Because Heschel’s God in Search of Man and his two-volume book The Prophets, along with everything else he wrote, was not just systematic theology or systematic philosophy. Rather, it was an attempt to articulate the religious experience behind the text. What produces these texts? What kind of experience gave rise to these texts? These were the questions that Heschel posed. And when I took that spiritual line of inquiry, utilizing my own spiritual sensitivity, and began applying it to Jewish texts, I began to see how things fit with each other. This was crucial to my approach to Jewish mysticism, which is quite different from that of other scholars such as Gershom Scholem or Moshe Idel. I, following my teacher Georges Vajda, promoted the concept of philosophic mysticism. That is to say, even philosophy itself must have a mystical experience and for thinkers like Maimonides philosophy actually culminated in mystical experience. My type of sensibility and my type of inquiry has even led me to an interpretation of Mordecai Kaplan as a kind of philosophic mystic, although it’s harder to gather the data on that. Given my spiritual propensity from childhood and my attention to the experiential dimension that generates religious texts, I’m not sure that I actually chose this career as much as it was in me to do. In retrospect, I was just in the right places at the right moment, studying with the right people. And having the privilege to work in the right institutions where I could explore these things. Unlike most Jewish academics, you have always been very active in Jewish communal affairs and have taken public stand on various issues. How do you integrate the academic and nonacademic dimensions of your life? Is there a tension between scholarly work and communal involvement or do they complement each other? In truth, I have never understood why this is perceived as a problem. To me, it has never been a question, although I understand that it is a question for other people. And it’s very common to find people in departments of religion who left schools of theology (now, I am referring to Protestant divinity schools) because they felt that the school of theology was too religious for them whereas the department of religion was not supposed to be, and was trying not to be religious. I’ve never thought of it that way. I’ve never perceived a conflict between my work as a theologian and my

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academic scholarship any more than I thought that being an intellectual was a contradiction to being in the rabbinate. I think that life is a combination of various types of activities. Thus, the intellectual sources one studies reflect actual religious experiences, and conversely, religious experiences themselves have intellectual structures built into them. As I see it, it’s possible for us to reach out and to do both at the same time. In terms of community activity, that certainly is never a problem. I don’t think I would hire anybody at Emory who didn’t have some kind of commitments outside Emory, whether it was Amnesty International or some kind of public commitment. It doesn’t have to be necessarily religious commitment, but some kind of commitment to community justice and social service. Well, that issue is rather close to my heart. As you may recall in December 1998 I delivered a speech at the Association of Jewish Studies that argued along the same lines: I suggested that the scholar of Jewish studies should become involved in public education. A lot of people took issue with me because they were unhappy about blurring the boundaries between the academy and society at large. My critics felt that they should be left alone to do their scholarly work and that they should not be expected to be involved in the Jewish community. I agree with you. I think there’s a public dimension to our scholarship. There are some people who are pronouncedly public scholars. At Emory my colleague Deborah Lipstadt is one such public intellectual, as is Kenneth Stein. Besides these extraordinary public intellectuals at Emory, almost everybody on the Jewish Studies faculty has some kind of commitment to the Jewish educational system or to synagogues, or to Zionist causes, or to anti-Zionist causes. Whether the commitment is to the Left or to the Right politically speaking doesn’t make any difference to me, but it does matter that you have a commitment beyond scholarship. It is interesting that in the self-identification paragraph you never explicitly call yourself a theologian or a philosopher. This is odd since you have written very eloquently and elegantly about being a Jewish theologian. How do you explain this omission? Well, the omission can be explained by the fact that the paragraph is taken from The Banality of Good and Evil. In my book Facing the Abusing

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God I do call myself a theologian and discuss at some length what that means. Before we discuss your understanding of theology could you say more about your training as an historian of medieval Jewish philosophy, since it was in that context that you developed yourself as a Jewish philosopher? Does the institutional setting for doing Jewish philosophy (or Jewish theology) matter? Does it make a difference if your appointment is in a rabbinic seminary, a department of religious studies, a department of philosophy, or a program of Jewish studies? Would you do different things in each of these settings or is it the case that you are who you are and the academic setting is irrelevant? I think that I am closer to the latter rather than the former. I do what I do no matter where I am. When I was a rabbi I taught Jewish mysticism in a congregation, although initially I was very reluctant to teach this material because nobody in the congregation had any kind of training at all. Then I realized that my reservation was silly and went ahead to introduce congregants to Jewish mysticism, even though they had no academic training. You do not need to have special training to have something to say; in fact, I believe that everybody has something to say that is relevant to the interpretation of the text. And you have to be able to say what you feel and think. Every scholar of Jewish studies has something that he or she cares deeply about, and they have to express it through projects outside of the academy. For example, my colleague, Benny Harry cares deeply about Jewish culture and linguistics and he runs a summer program that brings students to Europe and Israel. For other colleagues Jewish law is the primary concern and you can teach about it in the department of religion, in the synagogue, or in the school of law. You can teach the same material in different educational settings; the only thing you adjust for is the level of receptiveness and education in the audience. Sometimes you’re dealing with an educated audience, so you work on a higher level, and sometimes you’re dealing with an uneducated audience, and you still have to be able to do that as well. I remember vividly when I got to Brown University, Jacob Neusner said to me: “I see you’ve done some work on Jewish mysticism, do you understand anything about that?” I said, “Yes, I understand a little.” He said, “Good, teach the course.” And I said, “I can’t teach it. First, there are no available English translations, and second, the material is enormously complex and

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sensitive.” And he said, “If there are no texts, translate them. And as for complexity, you have to be able to teach it. And if you can’t teach it on the most elementary levels, you really don’t understand it.” I subsequently learned that for this reason, the great Talmud scholar Saul Lieberman always taught the elementary Talmud course. That is, the rosh yeshiva has to be able to explain things to a person who knows absolutely nothing because that is a test of how deep your understanding of the material goes. So, I think that you have to be able to function on all levels. But the content of what you say does not really change from one educational setting to another. What would happen if you had to teach Jewish philosophy in a regular department of philosophy? As you know, in the United States these departments are committed to analytic philosophy and they do not teach continental philosophy let alone Jewish philosophy. What would happen to Jewish philosophy in that situation? I would imagine that as a professor of Jewish philosophy you would probably encounter a lot of hostility. How would you handle such a scenario? I probably would encounter considerable hostility and resistance to the teaching of Jewish philosophy. I’ve always been fortunate that we’ve had somebody else in the department of philosophy, so I haven’t had to deal with those questions. I think that what would happen is they would force me to ask certain kinds of questions that otherwise I wouldn’t be asking. As I see it, Jewish philosophy presents the following question: How do you take what you’ve learned in philosophy (which is outside the scope of your religious tradition) and read it back into the tradition? It’s really a hermeneutical enterprise. The primary Jewish example of doing just that is Moses Maimonides’ The Guide for the Perplexed, which is primarily a hermeneutical enterprise. It’s not a philosophic enterprise in the sense of classic philosophical works of antiquity (e.g., the philosophy of Plato and Aristotle) and even the philosophic works of medieval Islamic civilization (e.g., by Alfarabi, Avicenna, or Averroes). From the very opening chapters of the Guide you see that Maimonides doesn’t do philosophy as these thinkers did; right away he begins with the hermeneutical issues. In departments of philosophy different types of questions are raised which have nothing to do with the sacred texts that frame the Jewish philosophical tradition. For example, one could ask, “Is goodness natural? If so, then what does that say about God?” This is a kind of question that I do

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not normally ask, so if I had worked in a philosophy department, the interaction with other colleagues would have led me to raise certain kinds of questions that I currently don’t deal with, or deal with in a different way. By the same token, teaching in a department of religion compels me to ask comparative questions and to consider data from Islam, from Christianity, and from Hinduism, all of which have also forced me to rethink some of the Jewish material. It doesn’t change the way I interpret the material, but it makes me think about the material differently. You received the best possible training in the history of medieval Jewish philosophy and yet at some point in your career you left it behind. Right. Can you explain why did you find medieval Jewish philosophy to be of limited value to you? Why did you put it aside? A prior question would be: Why did you gravitate towards medieval Jewish philosophy? In truth, I didn’t gravitate towards medieval Jewish philosophy. I was enrolled at the doctoral program at Columbia University in the Department of Religion. And then I had to decide what I wanted to write about for my doctoral thesis. I had studied Arabic at the University of Pennsylvania. I had created the Judeo-Arabic seminar at the Jewish Theological Seminary in which we studied with Abraham Halkin various and sundry texts. And it made some sense to do something with my knowledge of Judeo-Arabic. So I arranged to take my exams in Judeo-Islamic philosophy and I learned how to write a thesis in Judeo-Islamic philosophy. I originally wanted to write a thesis on the history of the idea of God. And I went to see Harry Wolfson, who was teaching at Harvard. When I told him what I wanted to do he looked at me and he said, “Young man, you are too young to write such a book. Pick a manuscript. A manuscript is to the scholar what a laboratory is to the scientist.” And a manuscript, as he said, has a beginning, a middle, and an end. And you should write a thesis analyzing a given manuscript. So, that’s what I did. I went to the Jewish Theological Seminary and I went through the library until I found something which looked interesting to me, which was a text by Hoter ben Shlomo, the fifteenth-century Yemenite philosopher.

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Yet, this choice is quite unusual, since no one had paid attention to Yemenite intellectual life and no one knew that there was thriving philosophical activity in Yemen, which perpetuated Maimonidean rationalism. It was an unusual choice only because Wolfson told me how to go about choosing a manuscript. He said, “Don’t pick anybody before Maimonides. Pick somebody after Maimonides.” In those days there was no study of Kalam philosophy, which predated Maimonides, so I had to ask “Who wrote in Judeo-Arabic after Maimonides?” Wolfson told me that the Yemenite Jews continued the Maimonidean tradition, writing in Judeo-Arabic. The rest of the Jewish philosophical tradition, as you know, shifted to Hebrew in the thirteenth century. So, I went looking for Judeo-Arabic manuscripts which were post-Maimonidean which got me into the Yemenite manuscripts. Within this category, I had to choose a manuscript that paralleled Maimonides’ own writings, and then trace the changes in the tradition from the twelfth to the fifteenth centuries. My dissertation advisor was Professor Georges Vajda in Paris, and when I went to see him for the first time I brought along the printout fully prepared to throw it away had Vajda not been happy with it. And Vajda looked at it, saying in French “Hum, hum, interressante, interessante.” Then he told me the following: “Type it out. Copy out the manuscript.” He said, “The only way to learn about manuscripts is by actually copying the entire text.” So that was how I started to work on Judeo-Arabic philosophy. It was a quick and easy way to do a dissertation rather than engage in a matter of intellectual fascination or be particularly interested in that way of thinking. Once I started the work I discovered that there was a whole Yemenite tradition that didn’t know about Averroes (ibn Rushd), the Muslim philosopher who was a contemporary of Maimonides, who shaped Jewish philosophy in Spain from the thirteenth century onward and who shaped the reception of Maimonides among Jews. So for me the interesting question was: How did Yemenite Jews read and interpret Maimonides? In the West everybody else was reading him through the eyes of Averroes, but if you do not have Averroes as the lens through which to understand Maimonides, how were you going to interpret him? The answer was that Yemenite Jewish philosophers developed a philosophical-mystical reading of Maimonides. Once I began to read Maimonides in that way, I realized that Hasidic masters in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (especially in Habad circles) also

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read him that way, too, without knowing anything about their Yemenite predecessors. The history of the reception of Maimonides is very interesting, but at some point in your career either the methodology of the history of medieval Jewish philosophy or its content—and I’m not sure which is more important here—became less compelling to you. There were indeed two factors at work here. One factor pertains to the fact that medieval Jewish philosophy, even the Rambam (i.e., Maimonides), is based upon a world view which has been dead for about four hundred years, if not more. And I am pretty sure that the Rambam himself wouldn’t want us wasting our time on science that is basically obsolete and on the philosophy that is based on such obsolete science. This point is especially pertinent for Yemenite Jewish philosophy, since that community was less sophisticated scientifically than the world of the Rambam. So the decision to move away from the medieval world had to do with the content of medieval Jewish philosophy. The second factor that led me to leave medieval Jewish philosophy had to do with the fact that within Judaism there is a rationalist stream, but there is also a spiritual or mystical stream. I felt that I had gone about as far as I could go in the rationalist stream. When I was in high school I studied Mordecai Kaplan and I even prayed regularly out of the Reconstructionist prayer book. Kaplan for me was the epitome of Jewish rationalism in the modern period, and Maimonides was the most rigorously rational figure in the premodern period. Once I understood the trajectory from Maimonides to Kaplan, I could see where medieval Jewish rationalism leads. By contrast, Heschel and the Zohar opened up new lines of thought for me which were intellectually and religiously much more vibrant. So the decision to leave medieval Jewish philosophy was a combination of two things: my critique of the philosophic content of their thought and my critique of the rationalist method. I felt that medieval Jewish philosophy was no longer central to what I thought needed to be said in terms of the living, spiritual life of the Jewish people. Didn’t your decision entail a shift in your work from the history of Jewish philosophy (or historicism more generally) to doing constructive theology? Is it fair to say that the analysis of what past authors said became spiritually irrelevant or spiritually superficial to you, leading you to move into contemporary theology?

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I don’t think it was the fact that medieval Jewish philosophy was superficial, but rather it was the fact that the issues medieval Jewish philosophy discussed were not what I wanted to say constructively. This is an important issue because it also pertains to the future of Jewish philosophy and to the role that Jewish philosophy plays today. I think that part of the role of philosophy is to keep the rational stream alive within Judaism. This is not trivial, because Jewish rationalist thought can really die very, very quickly in the anthropological, sociological whirlpool of Jewish ethnic identity. The rationalist stream can also die very, very quickly in a lot of mystical, pseudo-mystical and outright fraudulent mystical stuff that floats around today. Nonetheless, I think that within the rationalist tradition itself there is a spiritual dimension that needs to be talked about, as much as we need to understand the spiritual-mystical tradition which developed alongside the rationalist tradition in Judaism. Perhaps there is another issue we need to take into consideration. Scholarship on medieval Jewish thought to this day remains primarily descriptive and scholars are not willing to plumb the depths of these great thinkers, because to do so requires one to misread them or unread them in ways that go beyond the historical description. Therefore, it is not clear what the future of the study of medieval Jewish philosophy will be. I don’t agree with this description. I find that when I teach the Rambam, students all want to ask the crucial, critical questions about relevance, but I tell them, “You don’t know enough yet to ask those questions. Let’s just wait until we get, say, two-thirds of the way through the semester.” I tell my students that I’m not afraid of these questions about relevance because Maimonides wasn’t afraid of them either, but we have to know more about what’s going on in the world of Maimonides to ask the right questions. For example, to understand the worldview of Maimonides one has to know medieval cosmology (namely astronomy and physics), since his philosophy is based on and flows out of the cosmology. Today we know that the science undergirding his cosmology is simply wrong. My students usually ask me the question, “Well, what would Maimonides say today?” Since he was wrong, he would want to know what does evolution say about the problem of the origin of the universe and what does quantum mechanics say about the composition and behavior of matter, and so on and so forth.

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Maimonides is very attentive to the potential conflict between science and Scripture. His basic position, I think, is expressed in the Guide of the Perplexed Part II chapter 25, where Maimonides tell us that when science and the biblical tradition conflict, we must engage in exegesis of the biblical tradition. So, Maimonides could go back to the biblical text , to chapter 1 in Genesis, as he does in the Guide II:29–30. In a course on Maimonides, as part of the final exam I challenge my students to give me a modern theory that applies to the biblical text, or to restate the biblical text in light of contemporary science. In other words, I ask them to approach the biblical text as did Maimonides but with the kind of science we have today. As we do in regard to cosmology, we can do in regard to epistemology. Today we know that we have templates in our head, namely, in our brain, that shape how we perceive and interpret the world. We can ask how structural are these templates, a very important question for contemporary neuroscientists, which Maimonides did not ask. There are also questions about rhetoric which are relevant here: Are there things that we just don’t say and how far do we go in not saying what we’re saying? The Rambam had much to teach us in regard to what we can say or not say about God, and in this regard he remains very relevant today, but to recognize his continued relevance students must first learn a lot and understand the depth of Maimonides’ thought. Among the academic scholars of medieval Jewish philosophy no one wants to ask those questions. The preference is to remain historical. Therefore when one begins to engage Maimonides from contemporary perspective one is charged with “presentness,” or “presentism.” Academic scholars can get away with historicism, that is, limiting themselves to historical questions because they write for themselves. I don’t think we can get away with that when we teach undergraduates. I just don’t think we can do that and avoid engaging past authors in light of contemporary knowledge. Let’s explore the nature of Jewish philosophy by looking at the relationship between philosophy and theology. In your book Facing the Abusing God you have a wonderful section about what it means to be a Jewish theologian. You define theology as “the art of seeing the world from God’s point of view.” So, what does it mean to speak from God’s point of view? How does it relate to philosophy? Or is there something

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in between, maybe “philosophical theology” or “theological philosophy”? How do you understand the relationship between philosophy and theology? First of all, the insight is Heschel’s. He coined the term “theocentrism” in his book God in Search of Man. I agree with Heschel that that’s what theology ought to be. And I think that when we try to analyze the world from God’s point of view, we don’t start de novo. We always start from the text that we have. And the texts we have are very nuanced. They’re very, very complex. What philosophy tried to do with these texts, for which the Rambam is the model, was to take these texts and fit them into a rational model of preexisting propositions. According to the Rambam, there were certain presuppositions you have to have; for example, that God must be incorporeal. If this is true, that is, if God is incorporeal, then everything else is but metaphor. In Part I of the Guide, the Rambam applies those principles to Scripture showing us how we need to interpret language about God. I don’t think the philosophic model is a good one. Rather, I think a better way to approach God is the model of human personality, or personhood. God is first and foremost a person or a personality. Now, human personality is the most complex construct we have. It is far more complex as a construct than any rational model or any computerized model that we have. We can get computers to think very, very fast, but they only think in zeroes and ones. Even if you build quantum computers, which results in a computer that actually thinks in more than just zeroes and ones, it is still working on an on/off basis. This type of thinking can be very, very fast, but it has no flexibility. Here is a personal anecdote to illustrate the point. My first academic position was at the University of Minnesota in the early 1970s, when computer work meant that we were still using punch cards. I enrolled in a course for computers for non-engineers and I remember asking the professor: “What would you do I if I broke your computer?” And he said: “You don’t know enough to break our computer. You’re going to get an error message, but you’re not going to know enough to break the computer.” And then I realized that our two-year-old child had more flexibility than this machine, which in those days occupied a whole building. Human personhood is so much more nuanced because the qualities of personhood are very diverse and their interactions are extremely subtle. The biblical text of Genesis speaks about God as a personality; God already has personhood before God creates the world. You may like or dislike God’s

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personality, but it exists. Rabbinic texts, especially in the Midrash assume that God has personality. The liturgy certainly assumes God has personality. Therefore, we address God as a person. Fair enough, but for many Jews today the very assumption of theism is hard to accept because they define themselves as secular or cultural Jews. For these Jews relating to God as a person makes little sense, intellectual or otherwise. So, what do you say to Jews today who are either not interested in theology or have a hard time accepting the theistic approach? To address this question we need to go back to Heschel again. We also need to reflect on the meaning of holiness: What is the sacred? What is the holy? What is the transcendent? In class when I teach this material, I put on the board the term “holy” and ask students to free associate about it; I then list all their associations on the board, and do the same thing with the word, “sacred.” We continue with this procedure when I put on the board the word “transcendent” and get their associations. This exercise is very difficult for students; it is almost like pulling teeth. It’s hard for them to do the exercise because they have no frame of reference for thinking about these terms. And then I go through and I strike out the tradition-conditioned terms (e.g., those which have to do with Torah). I’m not saying that the Torah is not holy, but viewing the Torah as holy is limited to the Jewish tradition. Ditto, with the terms rooted in Christian tradition. What this exercise demonstrates to students is that our vocabulary is very limited. We then discuss why is our vocabulary so poor and how do we know what these terms mean? My answer is that you only know what these terms mean because you have some kind of experiential reference in yourself. Everybody, or almost everybody, has some moment that they would call “sacred” or some encounter that they regard as “holy.” I want them to identify those moments but with the least amount of ritualistic baggage. So, if we get the terms with the least amount of baggage, we can identify them as “transcendent.” And if you understand or admit that there is a dimension of transcendence to which we have some kind of access, which cannot be described necessarily rationally, perhaps it can be rendered artistically, for example, musically, then you are able to grasp the meaning of transcendence. Heschel was right about that point: the first part of God in Search of Man is devoted to terms, such as “sublime” and “transcendent,” but Heschel provides no definitions, only allusions.

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And once you get the commonality that there is a reality which is transcendent to us, then you begin to ask yourself, “So what does all this have to do with me as a person? What does all this have to do with the tradition, whatever my tradition happens to be? What does all this have to do with ritual? What does all this have to do with organized religion?” Keep in mind that many rabbis today (at least many of the rabbis I knew), would not use the word “transcendent” to discuss their own religious experience or explain their belief in God. Very rarely, when I ask students to speak about experiences of holiness, do I get them to refer to synagogues (or churches, for that matter), in response to my question. But they do “know” what holiness is; they do “recognize” the realm of the transcendent. If this is the case, isn’t it pretty tragic? It means that the settings of organized religion are not the context within which one can have meaningful religious experience. It is very tragic, but that has to do with some very bad religious education in the United States. The other way to do it, to get to all of this, is to talk of multiple levels of consciousness, what we now call multitasking. These things have gotten so much easier since we have computers. I asked the students, “What do you do when you begin to drive your car? What is going on in your head?” And of course, there are a lot of things going on that have nothing to do with driving. Driving occupies maybe four percent of your attention until a soccer ball rolls out in front of your car, and then everything gets wiped out and you are concentrating on not hitting the kid who’s likely to be right behind. So, then, I ask this question eventually, “So what’s going on in your head when you recite the Lord’s Prayer in church? Or, if you are Jewish, What goes on in your head when your recite the Shema?” All of a sudden, I’ll get kids who are honest enough to say, “You know, when I recite the Shema, I’m thinking about the girl who’s sitting next to me; perhaps, what’s going to happen afterward.” Okay, that’s fair, right? But what do they think ought to be in their head? In order to bring students to understand what spiritual experience involves I have to begin with the referential point of the transcendent. And then I extend the discussion outwards into how does that relate to organized religion? How does it relate to rationality? Can you claim that I have had an extremely holy moment, and I am now allowed to violate the Shabbat? Of course, this is not a new question in Judaism, but the answer to that question in the Jewish tradition is “no.” At that point we begin to discuss the meaning of authority and the meaning of tradition

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along with many other complex questions. This entire discussion, I maintain, has to begin with reflections on terms such as “holy,” “transcendent,” and “sacred.” We need to isolate the question of the holy first, and therefore I hold that the category of the holy is one of the characteristics of God. For you speaking in theological terms comes easily and naturally, but today many Jews are very uncomfortable with Jewish theology. They simply have no use for this type of discourse. Right. Maybe these Jews can be open to Jewish philosophy, and I am not sure about it, while being most uncomfortable with Jewish theology. Jews don’t do theology, right? Right. So how do you explain the importance of Jewish theology? Why do we need Jewish theology in order to be Jewish? Well, I try not to tell people what they need or don’t need; instead I try just to deal with texts. The answers should come from encountering the Jewish texts. For example, in this time of year (late summer/early fall) we are reading Selichot, which are very, very beautiful texts. And you ask yourself, “What is going on in this text? What is being said in this text? These are beautiful poems but how are we to understand them?” Some of them raise interesting historical question, because although written in Europe during the Crusades they entered into the Sephardic prayer book and are recited by Sephardic Jews? So how did that come about? That is an interesting historical question, but it only touches the reception of the poetry. We still need to explain the content of poem. But what’s in the poems? Why does the Binding of Isaac (the Akedah) play a role in these poems? What is the connection between the liturgical situation of asking God’s forgiveness and the biblical text? When we begin to confront the content of the liturgy we begin to raise questions about theology in a formal sense, or philosophy in a formal sense. As a teacher, I often have to say, “Let’s just bracket these questions for a little while and talk about the text itself.” It’s not that I can’t answer these

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theological and philosophical questions; rather, in order for us to encounter the texts, it’s not useful to try to deal with those questions right away. Instead, we need to pose more textual questions: Did Isaac go with his father voluntarily or did he protest? If he did not protest, why didn’t he protest? Why didn’t Abraham protest God’s command? Isaac’s situation was different; does it have no ethical dimension? So we need to focus on Isaac: What is Isaac’s role? Can somebody do something which really creates merit for the next generation? Merit with respect to what? A good philosopher would immediately ask, “What are you talking about, merit? There is no such thing as merit. And who’s assigning the merit and for what part and in what context?” So by getting into the text, I’m able to turn off those kinds of questions. And in fact, you can study these traditional texts with people who are secular. You can do this with people who are so far from Judaism but somehow they get into it. I think getting into the text is more important than dealing with the objections to the system as a whole. In other words, the work of the theologian, the philosophical theologian, or the theological philosopher is hermeneutical. But hermeneutics requires exegesis. Put differently, theology requires encountering the text rather than theorizing about it. Absolutely. Absolutely. And you have to encounter the text out of your own wisdom and life experience, in addition to understanding the Hebrew. It’s helpful to be able to read the liturgy in the original Hebrew. For example, if you’re talking about a hymn to the Glory to God, you have to know what the word “glory” means. What does it mean to pray to the glory of God? You’ll never meet someone from a black church who doesn’t know what the word “glory” means, whereas among Jews that word is less commonly used or understood. Theology is the process of trying to articulate this process: to relate one’s awareness of God to articulations of conceptions of God. Philosophical theology, I think, is part of the effort to systematize the conception of it, as much as you can. But I’m not sure that personhood can be really systematized. That is a major debate in the field of psychology. Freud certainly tried to do so and he taught us a lot about the mechanisms that operate in our personal life. But Freud, himself, didn’t have one overarching system either and Freud’s own disciples debated with each other about the correct interpretation of their master, let alone debating with people who

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challenged the validity of psychoanalysis. For instance, it is evident that Freud’s understanding of human personality was incomplete because he totally missed the phenomenon of abuse. That was a big thing to miss if you are in the field of psychoanalytic thinking. And, conversely, there were other psychoanalysts who have discovered other things which could not be explained by the mechanism of Freudian psychoanalysis. So, even psychoanalysis was an attempt to systematize the human personality. I’m not sure that there’s a whole lot of system in psychoanalysis; or put differently, I’m not sure that psychoanalysis is genuinely systematic precisely because personhood accrues. As you get deeper and deeper insights into yourself, into other people, and hence into the personhood of God, you realize that personhood resists systematization. What you say is compelling in principle. The problem, in your personalist theology is that God is not exactly a person that you really want to have a relationship with. If God is indeed an “abusive God,” as you claim, why would one want to interact with such a God? You have to come to terms with God, just as you do with your own parent. But life doesn’t give you an option to choose your parents. There are some people who get stuck with abusive parents whether they like it or not. Similarly in our social life we may get stuck with people who are abusive, more or less. You have to work with your own limits in dealing with them, or with their limits in dealing with you. As we go through life together we have to work out these issues, which is very similar to the relationship with God. The subtitle of your book Facing the Abusing God is A Theology of Protest. The subtitle suggests that protest is a legitimate strategy for dealing with abusive or abusing personalities. If a father, for example, is abusive, we can say “I don’t want to have anything to do with my father.” If God is abusive, don’t we have the same option? How would you respond to this critique? Well, the book confronts this very problem. As you know, the middle section includes a correspondence between me and an adult survivor of child abuse by the name of Diane. She was deeply abused by her father who threw her off a bridge and who abused her sexually. When her father died, she called me and asked “David, do I have to sit shivah for my father?”

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Now, that is a complex ethical and legal issue and I told her that I would look into it by asking other Jewish legal scholars. I called my colleague, who is a brilliant legal scholar as well as a local halakhic authority, and after listening to the facts of the case he said: “No, the person in question does not have to sit shivah. A parent can lose the status of parent by the way they treat a child.” So, the option to terminate a relationship with an abusive parent does exist; there are people who take that position and they just quit. In terms of the relationship with God, it is possible to terminate that relationship and many Israeli secularists do precisely this. They do not deny their Jewishness, but they do not want to have any relationship with the abusing God. I fully understand people who look at the Holocaust and say, “There can’t possibly be a God after the Holocaust. And if there is, I don’t want to have anything to do with Him.” I totally understand that position. Just as I understand the position of the ultra-Orthodox, Haredi community which says “There must be a God and He can’t possibly have done what He did, therefore, it’s our fault.” Personally I do not accept either of those two answers; I reject both Israeli secularism and traditional theodicy. As a religious Jew who stands in a relationship with God, neither a rejection of God nor a denial of God’s existence is optional. Are you saying that Jewish secularism has no philosophical validity, or that there is something profoundly missing in the secularist position? Yes, I do think there’s something profoundly missing in Israeli secularism, although I wouldn’t go as far as to say it has no validity. I would say there’s something theologically and profoundly missing if one holds that there is no God. I also think that the Haredi world is missing something profound, when they take the position of “because of our sins.” Note that after the Holocaust, no major elegies (kinnot) were composed. By contrast, we have dozens of these elegies composed after the destructions of Jewish communities in the Rhine Valley during the First Crusade. These are beautiful, powerful poems that turn your stomach, indicating the ability of Jews to confront God after a major period of suffering. The Book of Lamentations, composed after the destruction of the First Temple, is another example of Jewish protest after deep trauma. But we don’t have anything like that from the Shoah. The Jewish religious community hasn’t produced the kind of poetry that can confront God. The secular Israeli community, on the other hand, has produced such poetry, for example,

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the poetry of Uri Tzvi Greenberg, which consists in a rejection of God. This is at least powerful poetry, but it does not express the stance of religious Jews who feel that they still have a relationship with God even after the Holocaust. In my opinion, the religious community in Israel and in the Diaspora is missing a deep theological moment in not trying to confront the fact that the Holocaust was a form of abuse. This is why I tried to create a liturgy which might be useable by Jews who want to stand in a relationship with God despite of the Holocaust. You have written extensively about the Holocaust as you tried to wrestle with its meaning and significance. You have done more than many other Jewish philosophers. Do you believe or do you think that the Holocaust can be grasped philosophically? Is it something that is amenable to philosophical analysis? Or do you endorse Susan Shapiro’s point that, after the Holocaust and because of it, language comes to a breaking point. When it comes to the Holocaust, you just give up in terms of trying to explain it or reiterate its meaning. So how do we frame the Holocaust? I think if we’re talking about a systematic analysis of the divine and the Holocaust, philosophy leads to a breakdown. As I understand it, the Rambam really couldn’t account for demonic evil; whatever the Nazis did cannot be accounted for by his theory of evil as privation. That’s one of the problems with his theory. By the same token, Mordecai Kaplan couldn’t really account for radical evil either. I don’t think philosophical theology deals well with evil in great dimensions. When Buber gets to it, you know, he turns to the demonic as a category of being—hardly a philosophic category. So I don’t think philosophic theology is going to get us very far. I also don’t think that traditional Jewish theology and its attempt to justify God (i.e., theodicy) is going to get us very far either. And finally, I don’t think that denial of evil is going to get us very far; it too is not a viable response to the atrocities. So there are only a limited number of options here, and none of them are very helpful. The theology of protest, which I have proposed, at least gets us somewhere emotionally. After my book Facing the Abusing God was published there was a special session about it at the annual meeting of the Association of Jewish Studies.

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I wish I could remember more of what was said, but on the way out, Rachel Adler who was part of the panel, turned to me and said, “David, only somebody who really loves God could have written this book.” Now, she is a psychoanalyst, as well as an educated scholar in Jewish studies, and coming from her, I took the comment as a great compliment. Indeed, there’s something positive about the position that I’ve taken that you have to hold on to your relationship with God, no matter how troubled and troubling this relationship is. And the only way to hold on with integrity is to protest. But there’s something about that position which nobody accepts. I haven’t met anybody who agrees with it at all. Yes, could you please reflect on the reception of the book? It’s very interesting. The book’s been reviewed thirty-odd times, but almost no Jews wrote a review of it. The book was published by a non-Jewish press, Westminster/John Knox Press, although originally it was submitted to Ktav, a Jewish press, which refused to publish it. I conclude that Jews did not want to touch this book, perhaps because deep down in their hearts they know I’m right, but at the same time, they don’t want to admit it. This is true about human beings generally, you know, that when someone tells you something that you really don’t want to know, if you don’t deny it outright, you at least distance yourself from it. And I think that that’s what happened. Similarly, while some of my other books have been translated into other languages, this one’s never been translated. The other part about the reception of the book, which is an interesting story, was the reception among survivors, both Holocaust survivors and abuse survivors. I have gotten two types of reception that are about equal. One reception is, “This is nonsense” and the other, contrary response is, “Boy, am I glad you said this. It’s about time somebody said this.” So I have gotten both reactions, from the Holocaust survivors and from adult survivors of child abuse. Some of them are really grateful and some of them say, “How can you possibly say such a thing? How dare you say such things? If it hadn’t been for the love of God, I would never have made it through this experience,” and so on and so forth. What is the teachable message of your theology of protest? Does the Holocaust teach us a lesson that can be transmitted to the next generation despite the horror of it?

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The answer is yes. The thing that I’m interested in teaching theologically about the Holocaust is: it’s okay to be angry with God. To put it differently, there is room in Judaism for a person to be angry with God. This is not true in Christianity. For Christians, the Crucifixion offers the sublimation of anger into suffering, and suffering itself becomes redemptive; there is not much room for protest. Even Jesus’ protest on the Cross is very muted. And of course, in Islam, there’s no such thing as protest at all; it’s all “Islam,” meaning “submission.” So the idea that you can be angry at God and that you can protest to God is a Jewish contribution to theology in general. The highlighting of protest within the Jewish tradition, as I and others (e.g., Anson Laytner) have done, is a liberating moment for Jews and for others. You made the problem of radical evil very central to your theological, educational, and spiritual project. Does that say something about the future direction of philosophy? Should we start with the problem of evil when we teach philosophy, especially Jewish philosophy? Does not your theocentrism (namely, insisting that God is in the center), actually marginalize the problem of evil? Not if you take God in a personalist mode. Indeed, if God is a person, as I have argued, then you have to ask yourself, “What is the role of evil in personhood?” The question is both logical and coherent, and the answer is that we know quite a lot about evil in personhood. I mean, Freud has taught us a lot about these things and there is an extensive literature on the demonic dimension of psychopathology. So, it is not true that evil is marginalized if we hold a personalist-theocentric view. In fact, we are fortunate Jewishly because the Zohar already has taught us a lot about the Other Side of God (the Sitra Ahra)—the dark, destructive, and demonic aspect of the divine personality. The Zohar is now being translated into English beautifully by Danny Matt and the main themes of the Zohar have been extremely well-presented by Isaiah Tishby in Mishnat ha-Zohar [The Wisdom of the Zohar, tr. D. Goldstein (Oxford: Littman Library, 1989), 3 vols.]. The Zohar elaborates on the destructive power of the Sitra Ahra and its capacity to take over the divine personality. The Zoharic approach to God as a constellation of ten dynamic powers makes talking about evil easier. Indeed, it makes it possible. This is one of those topics about which the rabbis say, “If it were not written, we could not say it.” But it so happens, it’s already written. The Zoharic framework enables us to look back

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at the biblical stories, and ask: “Why does God destroy all the world?” Or “Why does God change His mind about things?” I mean, there’s a long tradition here about the fact that God might not be as projectively good as most of Western theology claims. God, Himself, might be a much more nuanced personality than we usually think. Does that mean that it is senseless to speak about God as perfection? That’s a philosophic distortion, in my opinion. I don’t think that there is such a thing as a perfect person or perfect personhood. That’s why it’s the best model for understanding reality—precisely because there is no personalist perfection. Computers don’t make mistakes; they can’t. It’s not that they don’t want to, or they’re particularly disciplined, or that they’re morally and ethically good; it’s that they can’t make mistakes precisely because they have no personhood. Could not we say that the inability to commit mistakes is the reason why computers are perfect? All right, okay. But, if we want to approach evil, we have to start, first, with debunking this idea that there is a perfectly good God. And then we have to deal with those texts which indeed open up to us this whole idea—if God is not perfect, then what? How does God get off track? How do you get God back on track? All this is already stated in the Zohar, so I’m not making this up, and my approach is not that radical or original. The kabbalists indeed believed that they can “fix” God’s imperfection by performing the commandments in a special manner. That’s what theurgy is all about. But I don’t know how many contemporary Jews or modern and post-modern Jews can really take the notion of theurgy seriously as something that they can work with meaningfully in their lives. Okay. But keep in mind that most Jews take psychotherapy pretty seriously, which means that they do believe in the power of one person to shape another person, or that the encounter between personalities can be healing.

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That is, most Jews do assume that there is some way that you can help somebody to improve themselves as a person by receiving help from the outside. Now, if you don’t accept theurgy, if you don’t accept that we can help God improve God’s self from the outside, okay, I understand that. But psychotherapy also teaches you how to deal with the evil in the people around you, especially the people you can’t break from, such as parents, spouses, children, siblings; right? Sometimes this applies even to bosses, or to social institutions. Religion, Western religion anyway, has very nuanced answers to these questions. And the whole field of psychotherapy is developing very nuanced answers to how you deal with post-traumatic stress disorder. Post-traumatic stress disorder is not about going in, lying down on the couch four days a week for four years, working hard, and then coming out healed. That’s not the way it works. The nature of trauma, as opposed to neurosis, is that you can’t fix it. So how do you live with trauma? How do people who underwent traumatic experience continue to live and how do their spouse’s cope with their wounds? There is a whole literature out there on spouses of men who’ve come back with post-traumatic stress disorder from Iraq or Afghanistan, or elsewhere, or people who are spouses, or children, of adult survivors of child abuse, where the abuse has surfaced. Religion, Jewish religion anyway, provides us a theological method for dealing with this God who is a traumatizing God, an abusing Person with whom we cannot break. In Judaism there is a way of dealing with something which is not perfect, and which is never going to be perfect. If something is perfect, we know how to deal with it. We measure ourselves against it, we fail, we get up, and we try it again. But if you’re dealing with something which isn’t itself perfect and never will be perfect, how do you deal with that? If you’re dealing with something which is potentially, radically evil, how do you live with that? That is really what Facing the Abusing God was about. Protest is, I think, the Jewish response. For a long time I actually used the liturgies that I wrote as a liturgical act of protest in order to face the Holocaust. Later, I stopped using them, although I’m not even quite sure why I stopped using them. In retrospect, I think that I realized how radical these liturgies were. The thought that one can actually compose liturgy to deal with the Holocaust was daring enough; that’s where my Orthodox colleagues left me altogether. It was especially difficult for them to accept the fact that I ended the liturgy with the traditional Hebrew blessing. Perhaps the combination of radical ideas couched in traditional formulas was too difficult to accept, even for me.

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Still, all I am saying is: there is a way to deal with the dark side of God, but to do that you have to get away from the idea that God is perfect or that your parent is perfect. Freud’s right: our conception of God as perfect is no more than a projection of our parents, and if we are emotionally and theologically mature, we’ve got to get away from that. In your subsequent book The Banality of Good and Evil, you bring extensive use of contemporary social science to bear on the way you deal with these questions. Could you reflect on the role of social sciences in Jewish philosophical or theological thinking? I do not think that the social sciences have a whole lot to do with theology or philosophy, but they are indeed most relevant to ethics. The reason I became interested in the social sciences is that I found the traditional way of doing ethics unsatisfactory. Ethics tries to show that application of doctrines or rules is the way that people resolve conflict. All this is very, very interesting, but that’s not how people make decisions. That, in turn, got me into the whole question of why do some perfectly good people make some perfectly bad decisions. I’ll give you an example. This is a great example. After 9/11, President Bush got up and he said, “We will not tolerate any violence against Muslims in our midst.” There were only eight-hundred-odd recorded incidents of violence against Muslims after 9/11. Imagine what would have happened had President Bush said: “Now, I want you to keep your eyes on all our Arab neighbors. And if you see something, you better act quickly.” He was quite capable of saying this. If he had said this, we would have had thousands of incidents, including probably some killings. Violence against Muslims and other minorities in the post 9/11 period has to do with people conforming to what authority figures expect of them. That’s an insight that comes from the social sciences which I started to study in order to understand what happened in the Holocaust and how can we prevent another Holocaust-like event. People conform to what is expected of them. And it doesn’t make any difference whether it’s minor or whether it’s major. Even if it’s a major wrong, most people—about 85 percent according to social scientists—will conform. That’s what the studies of violence show. And so the question then becomes from an ethical point of view, how do you build resistance? That’s really what my book is about. If 95 percent of Europe, or maybe a little more, went along with

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the Nazis who committed the Holocaust, how do you build resistance to evil in society? In order to do that, you need some analysis about what makes people resistant. My understanding of human behavior in the Holocaust has been confirmed by many stories from other modern wars and genocides, for example the Vietnam War. The story of Hugh Thompson, a pilot of a spotter helicopter, who flew over the villages of My Lai, with his gunner and co-pilot, is a case in point. Thompson spotted an American who took a Vietnamese woman, clearly unarmed, put her on the ground, pulled out his pistol and shot her in the head. Thompson said to his crew, “We’re not supposed to be doing that.” Then he saw a group of Americans herding women, children, and old people into a bunker into which they were going to throw a grenade. He called in the big choppers and said, “You’ve got to stop this. You’ve got to go in there and save these people.” So, they set down the choppers, went in, and pulled those people out, evacuating them to a safe area. Next, Hugh Thompson began sending back reports that a massacre was going on in My Lai. Then, as he was flying around he saw a man—it turned out to be Lieutenant Calley—standing in front of a group of people who were in front of a ditch in which there were dead bodies. The officer was about to machine gun those standing at the ditch. So Thompson put his helicopter down, got out of his helicopter, turned to his gunner, Larry Colburn, and said, “Cover me.” And he went out and he confronted Lieutenant Calley, saying to him: “If you open fire on these people, we’re going to open fire on you. Stand down.” Now, Hugh Thompson was a lowlevel, non-commissioned person. Lieutenant Calley was a commissioned officer. So, this was a court-martialable offense. But Calley backed down. Later, on another mission, Thompson and his crew were flying over a pit of bodies. They put the helicopter down and they actually pulled a child out of that pit who was still alive, and they flew him to a nearby military hospital. And so on and so forth. As I read about Hugh Thompson, I started to wonder, “This man is a hero, but who is he? Where is he?” Here is a case of someone who definitely resisted evil. But who is he? It turns out that his lawyer during the courtmartial proceedings was the Emory University corporate counsel, whose name, believe it or not, was Joe Crooks. So I called Joe Crooks into my class. I said, “Tell us about Hugh Thompson.” And his response was, “Oh, we drink beer together.” And I couldn’t get anything out of Joe. So I said, “I want to talk to Hugh.” So we arranged to get Hugh Thompson to Emory University. Joe Weber, a prominent member of the Atlanta Jewish community who

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owns a radio station, invited him onto the radio station with me for a live interview. So, here I am on live radio interviewing Hugh Thompson. It turns out that Hugh Thompson comes from Stone Mountain, Georgia, headquarters for the Ku Klux Klan in the southeastern United States. So I ask myself, “How can a person who was exposed to that racist ideology behave as he did in the My Lai massacre?” The data from the social sciences shows that people who resist have two main influences in their background. First, they have a personal role model. They saw somebody in their family or other inner circle who resisted social pressure. Second, we know that in all of these cases, the punishment of the child is always reasonable by cultural standards and, if the punishment becomes unreasonable, the child can appeal to someone. So here I am with Hugh Thompson on live FM radio and I say, “Hugh, tell us a little bit about why you did this?” And he says, “Well, I’ll tell ya. I’m third-generation Army. And I killed people before and I killed people afterwards, and I sleep just fine. But this was not killing. If I see somebody with a gun, or I think they have a gun, I shoot first. But these were innocents. Killing innocent people is called murder. We in the Army don’t murder.” I said to myself, “Okay, now we’ve got the ethics of the situation stated clearly, so we can move on to find out what he’s really made of.” And I continue to inquire of Thompson, saying: “Hugh, tell me a little bit about discipline in your childhood?” He said, “Oh, I did lots of things wrong. And whenever I did something wrong, my Daddy would let me choose which whip he was gonna whip me with.” And I said to myself, “I’m on live radio. Blumenthal, what are you doing?” So I say to him, “Hugh, did you deserve all those whippings?” He said, “I sure did.” So he thinks that what his father did to him was fair. But I know that there’s got to be a course of appeal. So I said, “Come on, Hugh, I’ve got three boys. And sometimes you lose your temper and you just whack a kid who doesn’t deserve it. Whom did you appeal to when your Daddy did that to you?” He said, “Well, I could always go to Grandma. And Grandma would stop my Dad.” The sentence “And Grandma would stop my Dad” confirmed what I had learned about how another authority figure can intervene in situations of abuse. In the context of Thompson’s family, then, the punishment was perceived as reasonable. So I continued to explore the topic with Thompson: “Tell me, who in your family was really, you know, good?” And he said, “Well, I guess it was my Daddy.” And I said, “What’d he do?” He said, “Well, he was a runner. He was champion runner in the State of Georgia. Once, in Stone Mountain, we had races and they brought down a bunch of folks from the Indians in the mountains. And the folks at Stone Mountain said, ‘If they

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run, we’re not runnin’.’ And my Daddy said, ‘If they don’t run, I’m not runnin’.’ So he forced them to run with the Indians.” So here is the source of Thompson’s ability to protest the massacre in My Lai. His own father exemplified protest and served as a role model for his son, and discipline in his home was, by his standards, fair and had an appeals process built in to prevent abusive use of authority. Hugh’s story has nothing to do with the Holocaust, but it demonstrates the social and psychological mechanisms that allow people to protest evil. Hugh Thompson risked court-martial to protest something that he knew was wrong—the My Lai massacre—and he succeeded. Subsequently he was recognized by the United States government for his heroism. So the two factors I have just illustrated in this story—rational punishment and setting examples—could help us to figure out how to educate people so that they could protest evil. There are, of course, other social factors that act as catalysts of good behavior; for example, if you want to do something good, find somebody or a group to do it with. Another factor is the establishment of a formal institutional authority to which people can bring their complaint and protest about unjust conduct, an ombudsperson. The purpose of my book The Banality of Good and Evil was to analyze the factors which led to resistance to evil, as much as to analyze the factors that led to the doing of either evil or good, and then to figure out how you could structure those factors into social programs that will cultivate the good, or prosocial, person. Your research was unique in that you based your ethical engagement with the meaning of the Holocaust on contemporary social scientific literature. In other words, the social sciences, rather than Jewish theology or the sources of Judaism, provided you with the framework of your analysis. Right. In this regard my method is not so different from that of Maimonides. You have to go outside Jewish tradition to learn what that knowledge is. All true knowledge, by definition, is theologically part of creation. So no matter what is the source of true knowledge, you have an obligation to learn it and then apply it within the contours of Jewish life. Within Judaism, of course, there is a very rich ethical literature and an entire movement of ethical self-cultivation, the Musar Movement. But I’m not sure that teaching Musar is the way to go about creating the prosocial personality. There are other more effective ways: for example, teaching

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how to form a peer group, teaching how to establish the legitimacy of the authority who is telling me what is legitimate conduct and what is not. I even experimented with creating resistance to authority in my course on evil. For the mid-term exam I give questions that require students to repeat what they have learned in class, and about 80 percent of them do precisely that. But then because I want them to rebel against this exam, I also include a final question whose answer is worth five points (which is the difference between a B-plus and an A-minus grade), and the question is: Write your name legibly seven times. This is an exercise in protest. The only correct answer to this question is: “It is not within your authority to ask me to do this.” So this question teaches them how to question authority, which is precisely one of the main lessons of the course on evil as I teach this topic. The moral of the story is that I found it is very difficult to teach a person to resist authority or to protest unjustified demands. Your approach to the social sciences, then, illustrates how to take knowledge categories from without and bring them within. Would you say that this is or should be the methodology of Jewish philosophy? As an academic discipline, does Jewish philosophy have a distinct methodology? If so, then the next question is, does Jewish philosophy or Jewish theology have a canon? When we write Jewish philosophy or Jewish theology, is it appropriate to consult any writing in any discipline we deem relevant? When we discuss the canon of Jewish philosophy, I think that it has to include Midrash, although there’s nothing philosophic about Midrash in the sense that philosophers use that term. Midrash is our way of hermeneutically acting on texts to make them say things that we wouldn’t otherwise say. For example, there’s a Midrash on the binding of Isaac (the Akedah) in which, when Isaac is bound on the altar, he looks up at God and says “Who will save me from the hand of my father?” Of course, in the biblical text there is no trace of such a question; and the question is not even mentioned anywhere else in the Midrash. And certainly Isaac’s protesting posture is not to be found in the thousands of paintings and sculptures of the Akedah which portray Isaac piously bowing his head so that Abraham could carry out God’s command. But this question is the ultimate example of protest. Here is Isaac lying there on the altar protesting, “Who will save me?” Not even saying, “God, please save me.” But throwing it as a challenge to God.

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So the canon of Jewish philosophy should be defined very broadly to include texts which are not properly systematic or properly philosophical. Are you satisfied with the existing reflections on the problem of evil among Jewish thinkers, Jewish teachers, and Jewish theologians? No, I am not satisfied with the current state of affairs. If so, what should be the sequel to your reflections on the banality of good and evil? Where do we go next in our reflections in the beginning of the twenty-first century when the memory of the Holocaust is beginning to recede from the minds of many people? I think that if we’re going to reflect seriously on the existence of evil in a theocentric universe, someone needs to write a really good critique of my book from the outside, namely, from the perspective of the social sciences. That is, someone’s got to say that our understanding of psychopathology has advanced from the point at which Blumenthal wrote this book in light of neuroscience, or in light of a lot of what we’ve learned about psychotherapy with perpetrators. There’s a whole field out there of psychotherapy with perpetrators. There is also a lot of new knowledge of post-traumatic stress disorder which we just didn’t know when I wrote the book. Since the 1990s we’ve learned a lot about how difficult it is to recover from traumatic experiences, even if you protest. So, I think there’s more that could be done on this. I don’t have the strength to do it anymore, but there can and should be a sequel to The Banality of Good and Evil. That book, as you know, represents a real departure from my previous work on medieval Jewish philosophy and Jewish theology. In life we have the ability to reflect about our course of action and determine whether we have made mistakes. I have asked myself whether I made a mistake in not setting up a medieval Jewish studies program here at Emory during the 1980s. I’ve thought about that many times and I think that in retrospect I did make a mistake in not setting up a doctoral program of some kind in Jewish thought. We created a doctoral program in constructive theology which ran for a little while, but the mistake I made was not to create a full-fledged graduate program in Jewish thought. I didn’t have enough political backup.

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Upon reflection, another mistake that I made was that, after writing The Banality of Good and Evil, I didn’t immediately move into assigning students to do doctorates in the field of moral education. This field could have generated interesting applied research with new types of students; for example, nurses in hospitals, younger partners in law firms. The issues raised by my book could have sustained a totally different kind of graduate program that could have explored these problems really effectively. But you have the Center for Ethics here at Emory, so that this type of research could be undertaken by that center. That is a possibility, but I am seventy-five, so I’m not sure that I can bring it about. I’m not the person to do it anymore. But I think there was a time when there was room to establish a program which would have systematically looked into these questions There are some other programs that work with American soldiers who did something wrong during their service abroad, be it Iraq or Afghanistan. The conduct of these people was not enough to warrant prosecution, but it was enough to make them feel deeply guilty. One such program exists at Bright Divinity School in Texas. Another area where we at Emory could have done something revolves around the activist community right after 9/11. For example, a chaplain of the Fire Department for 9/11 came to a lecture I gave once on this topic. He came up to me and said, “That’s just what my firemen told me. We’re not heroes; we were just doing our job.” They were the good guys just doing their job. And a lot of them are second-, third-generation firemen. A lot of them come from homes where this kind of prosocial activity is encouraged. We could have focused on these people as a way to better understand what leads people to do prosocial acts. I didn’t do it, and I should have. This type of research argues for the validity of defining Jewish thought in broader categories. Right. In your writings you have demanded the word “spirituality” to be the appropriate category for Jewish intellectual creativity. In that context you include not only philosophy but also the study of Kabbalah and

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Hasidism, as well as contemporary movements such as feminism. So, how do you understand Jewish spirituality? What’s the merit of using the category “spirituality”? Why have other scholars argued against that category? Spirituality, as we said before, is like musicality. Some folks are gifted musically, some folks have moderate abilities, and some folks are tone-deaf. Similarly, there are folks who are spiritually gifted, some who are moderately endowed, and some who are spiritually tone-deaf. That doesn’t mean they’re not good people. They can be very good people. They could be leading protest movements all over the place. They can even be extreme intellectuals, as some of my colleagues are. But they simply lack the spiritual bent. Some people just don’t get it, which is okay with me. But for the folks who do get it, the relevant question is what constitutes spiritual education? Can spirituality be taught? Can it be cultivated? I think, the answer is “yes”; spirituality can be taught, especially if you’re working with this personality model which is itself an enormously complex model to work with. In spiritual discourse, one keeps shifting back and forth between psychology, theology, and text, and the spiritual inquiry gets deeper and deeper as you go along, insofar as people can follow you. The reason we need to engage in spiritual education is the outstanding quality of Jewish civilization. To be a Jew means to live in the presence of a living God, and the question is, how? What do we do about that task? How does that relate to social behavior and institutions or to intellectual endeavors, and so on and so forth. And I think Jewish studies courses ought to be able to answer these questions. In other words, training in spirituality should be part of Jewish studies. I’ll give you just an example which has nothing to do with philosophy. The idea of teshuvah, commonly translated as “repentance,” is unique in world religions. I don’t really know any place else which really maintains that you can do something really bad and do your best to make good on it. And then get up and go on. Now, we all have this phenomenon in life. For example, if you are playing on a sports team and you fall down, you don’t just lie down and beat your breast. Rather, you get up and you keep playing. And if you make the mistake two or three times, you need somebody to help you correct whatever it is that you’re doing that fixes it so that you’re not going to be knocked down again. But the idea that this can be done morally and spiritually and that you can always come back and fix it, or at least do your best to try to fix it, that’s a uniquely Jewish idea, an idea which Judaism contributed to civilization.

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Another unique idea that Judaism has contributed to civilization is that all knowledge is “kosher,” that is to say, there’s no such thing as knowledge which is excluded, or a priori forbidden. And whether that knowledge is psychoanalysis, at one end, or quantum mechanics, at the other, it’s all part of what God has given us. It’s all part of creation. This is why my understanding of spirituality is rather broad and why it includes variegated types of knowledge that are culled from very different sources. I think that these are things that we can do and teach. As a theologian, a spiritual person, an educator, a community person, I would ask you to reflect on the relationship between the Jews who live in the State of Israel and the Jewish community in the Diaspora. I ask you to do so because you have written a lot about chosenness and you take the notion of the Chosen People very, very seriously. You also have written about the Land of Israel as a a theological category. So, how do you defend the doctrine of chosenness, either to non-Jews or to Jews who find it problematic? What do you say to Jews who find the notion of divine election to be problematic? I must admit that I have never understood this kind of question. How and why do Jews have a problem with the notion of chosenness? This is not to say that I take it for granted, but because life is that way. In all aspects of life you see examples of choosing and being chosen. You see the dynamics of chosenness even within the family. When students raise problems with the concept of chosenness, I ask, “Do you have siblings? Is the first child in your family in some sense of the word ‘chosen’?” The answers vary; some students who are first born say “no” and others say “yes.” In some families the first born is chosen and in others it is the youngest child, but everybody lives with the idea of chosenness and is surrounded by examples of it, so I don’t know what the problem is. The notion of being elected by God may rightly cause some discomfort, especially to non-Jews. Historically, after all, the doctrine of divine election by God has been hotly contested between Jews and Christians who debated who is the “true Israel”? Who is really chosen by God? The idea that you’re chosen by God could indeed be socially problematic if you use that as a red flag to run around and aggravate other people or claim superiority over other people. In this case, you have reason to say

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that the belief in being chosen is not very nice and in many cases it’s not very smart. I also reject the notion that we are chosen for suffering; that is clearly an unacceptable kind of choosing. I don’t believe that God chooses us for suffering. The idea of chosenness has become especially problematic in the modern period because the Western world, including Jews, has accepted the idea of democracy and its inherent egalitarian thrust. Chosenness doesn’t give you anything special, except the subjective feeling that your are chosen. You could be a chosen third child, without any outward benefits, and spend the rest of your life in trouble. Chosenness for me is a state of being, like having blue eyes; you either have them or you don’t have them. Chosenness doesn’t do anything for you, except that it may make you feel in some way special. People who regard themselves as the object of the completely indivisible and absolute love of Jesus feel themselves chosen, and they feel sorry for those of us who are not so loved by God. People who feel encompassed by the Virgin Mary’s totally unlimited motherly love feel chosen. One cannot really understand the cult of the Virgin without realizing this. I understand this. By the same token, I feel that God loves the Jewish people, clearly and unreservedly. Are the Jews chosen for a task? If so, what is the task of the Jewish people? The task of the Jewish people is to live with God. This task is very similar to the task we have in regard to our parents. You are chosen to live with your parents, which means that you take care of your parents, as best as you can as long as you can. As parents, too, we are chosen to take care of our children, as long as we can and as best as we can. Sometimes it’s easy and sometimes it’s rewarding, and sometimes it’s not easy and sometimes it’s not rewarding. But it is part of the fabric of life, that is what it means to say that we are all chosen and we all choose. Once you realize that you are chosen, then the question becomes: “What kind of a life should I live”? I mean, to me the question begins after you’ve made the statement, “I am chosen and I choose.” In the case of being a parent, once I am aware that I choose my child to whom I am a parent, then I have to ask myself, “Am I really doing everything I should for this child? Is there more that I should

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be doing?” As a child, I need to ask, “Have I done everything for my parents that I ought to be doing?” For that matter, we need to ask these questions also for a spouse or a sibling. For me, at least, the answer to your question, most of the time, is “no,” which means that there’s more that I should be doing. But that’s an actual question that follows upon a more existential realization of the fact that these people are in my circle of chosenness. Put differently, chosenness just means that we’re in the circle. And the Jewish People is in God’s circle. And that gives us certain kinds of responsibilities, and we have to ask ourselves, how are we fulfilling the responsibilities? Jewish thinkers who are unhappy with the idea of chosenness, as was Mordecai Kaplan, really offend some Jews. This why Kaplan’s Reconstructionist siddur was publicly burned by Agudat Ha-Rabbanim on June 12, 1945, right after it was published— because Kaplan deleted the chosenness of Israel. This was particularly offensive right after the Holocaust. So for you, the notion of election is actually about responsibility. Is that correct? I think it’s all about responsibility, about the embodiment of chosenness, if you want to put it that way. So let’s return to the question of the State of Israel versus the Diaspora, since the state was established right after the Holocaust. Is the establishment of the State of Israel a theological event? Does the state have a theological meaning? How do you understand the theological dimension of the State of Israel? I think that the State of Israel does have a theological dimension. I understand people who have no sense of a living God, because they don’t live in the presence of God, and therefore they do not interpret the existence of the State of Israel in theological terms. But these people have no theological interpretation of the Holocaust, either. And they have no theological interpretation of anything else, because they don’t have a living presence that they’re living with. Yes, that is correct. But most Jews today, especially in Israel, do not think in theological terms and interpret life in secular categories.

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Okay. Well, the very existence of secular Jews has a little bit to do with rebellion against organized religion. Most of the Jewish rebellion is completely justified in my opinion, and here I speak as a professional in the field. That rebellion has a lot to do with some really bad practices in institutionalized Jewish life in the Diaspora and in Israel. As for the conduct of religious officials in Israel, I have experienced it personally in a funeral at which I was asked to officiate. The family of the deceased person is secular but they asked me to officiate even though there was another official rabbi in attendance. When that person saw me, he was not going to let me officiate at all. It was only when I mentioned the name of his cousin, with whom I prayed with at the Wall, that the rabbi said “Okay, you can have a part in the funeral; you can do something.” So, he let me do one little prayer. And then when I left out a word, he redid it after I recited the prayer. After the rabbi left, then the funeral began in earnest. The children spoke, the friends spoke, and then those who wanted to say Kaddish a second time, men and women together. The real religious experience, thus, began only after the rabbi left. This illustrates the alienation from the rabbinate in Israel and the reason why Israelis prefer to have nothing to do with the religious establishment. As I see it, this is essentially a political and social problem; it is not a theological problem. But does not the social or political problem have theological consequences, namely the deep alienation from Judaism? I agree that the religious establishment in Israel alienates a lot of people. And I think the Israeli religious establishment is making major efforts to correct the situation. For me, the State of Israel has theological meaning. You can’t say God was active in the Holocaust, therefore, I don’t believe in God; but God is not active in the establishment of the State of Israel. You either say God is active in history, or you don’t. If you say God is active in history, then both moments have to be included. In other words, both the Holocaust and the establishment of the State of Israel have theological significance. I say that to my religious colleagues, as well. You have to say the Holocaust is an act of God as much as the State of Israel is an act of God. You can’t have your cake and eat it, too, in this situation. One of the major issues, perhaps one of the tragic aspects of Jewish life today, is that Jews no longer agree on what it means to be Jewish. What is your view on diversity in contemporary Judaism? Should we cultivate

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diversity or should we instead work more diligently toward greater convergence and unity? How do we reconcile commitment to democratic ideals, which is pro-diversity, with a more traditional understanding of the tradition? Well, I’m not much in favor of convergences myself. I’m on the diversity side of this issue. I think that Jewish people need to organize themselves into groups, and to do what they need to do to be Jewish. That doesn’t mean that I personally am going to approve of everything that everybody does. But that’s a different story. We had a case just two weeks ago: a good friend of one of our children had a son. The father had always believed he was Jewish. But it turned out he isn’t because his mother isn’t. And he married a girl who’s not Jewish and they’re having a bris. Halakhically the newborn can be circumcised, but not converted by that process. There’s no such thing as a bris for conversion if the two parents are not Jewish, even if the father believes himself to be Jewish, and especially if the mother is not even planning on conversion. So I didn’t go. A week later the young couple actually got married and the officiating clergyman said, “You seem to have eaten dinner before you rang the bell.” So this event was clearly a civil marriage, not a religious marriage between two Jews. This is just an example of situations in which I don’t participate and with which I don’t agree personally. The more intensively textual and educated the form of Judaism you’ve got, the closer you are to some kind of authenticity. That’s my own personal opinion. Does that mean that many people who are defined as Jews and define themselves as Jews today are inauthentic? I don’t like using negative terms about people. I just say there are some folks who are out there, a lot of them, whose Jewishness is very tenuous because of multitasking. They are so busy doing so many things, and there’s so much which is available for them to do, and Jewish activities are not as central as they used to be. Are you saying that the abundance of cultural choices today has diminished Jewish identity? Yes, the abundance of choices has an impact on the ability of Jewish youth to self-identify as Jews. We see a parallel situation with the decline of the

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humanities. Throughout institutions of higher education, the humanities are down. And this has a lot to do with the economic situation of the country and the belief that a university degree is supposed to guarantee you a job or a certain level of income. But the decline of the humanities also has a lot to do with the fact that kids today live in a culture that doesn’t encourage them toward a reflective and a self-reflective stance, which the arts and the humanities would give them. Yes, that’s an apt way of putting it. In previous decades, it was assumed that a person should at least take one course in religion or one course in philosophy or one course in the arts, if one expected to be an educated citizen. But that is no longer on the platter, so to speak. The decline of the humanities and the lack of self-reflection have a lot to do with the fact that the life of a young person today is filled up with continuous socializing through the use of technology, such as texting. Digital technology shapes the life of our youngsters much more than it shapes our life. I fully agree, and in fact lamented that very point in an interview I had with a principal engineer of Intel for something called “Project Tomorrow” that Intel is doing with ASU. I, too, lamented the dictatorship of technology and its deleterious impact on our culture, because of the lack of introspection, the inability to concentrate and comprehend a written text. Right. I agree that reading comprehension is gone. The ability of students to simply read the plain text, not only to read out loud and read and comprehend, but the idea that one should read does not exist today, even though texts are more easily available now than they ever were. The technology of tweeting has enormous cultural implications and they are largely problematic. This technology also has neurological implications, because it’s changing the way the brain functions. Yes.

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Technology is definitely a major challenge to the quality of culture. And you’re saying that you make a connection with Jewishness, that Jewish kids today are less interested in learning about who they are. That’s right, but it’s not just the Jewish kids; it’s true also for non-Jewish students whom I advise. As I advise students the first thing I do when a student comes in is to find out where he or she comes from. I do not refer to ethnic identity which can be seen with African-American students or Asian students. I engage students about their schooling and find out if they went to a Catholic school, for example. In this case, my message is that you should learn something about Catholic tradition from an adult point of view and you should engage your own tradition as an adult. If a student comes from a Scottish background I encourage the student to learn something about Scottish history or American history. Similarly I engage students from a Chinese or Korean background and find out what they know about their heritage. Even if they speak the language, they usually do not know much about the culture. My message to Jewish students is the same, but unfortunately, there’s a kind of cultural flattening today that should be of great concern to all of us. What do you consider the most pressing problem Jews face as philosophers, theologians, educators, ethicists, in the beginning of the twentyfirst century? What do you consider the most pressing, compelling, or challenging issues? As Jews our problem becomes how to transmit the seriousness of Jewish civilization to the next generation. Without saying that Judaism has to be this or that (e.g., Orthodox, liberal, or something in between), the real issue is taking Judaism, however defined, seriously. I consider this to be a pretty central problem. For many years I thought that the solution to this issue is summer camps, because in the camps Jewish kids learn more about being Jewish through informal education than they do in formal education. But I do not see that summer camps can really address the challenge. The corollary of that problem is interest in, and concern about, the State of Israel. In the last presidential campaign somewhere between 63 percent and 75 percent of the Jews voted for Obama because they approved of his liberal, social programs (as I do, too), even though his attitude toward Israel does not generate Jewish trust. The Jewish support of Obama despite his

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policies on Israel tells me a lot about the nature of Jewish consciousness and the declining importance of Israel in Jewish self-identification. I have noticed for quite a while that students are less and less Israel-conscious. We can also say that Jewish community in America in general is less and less Israel-conscious. In terms of the future of the Jewish people I consider this to be a serious problem. Unfortunately, I don’t think that Israelis living in America are much help in solving this problem. But there’s got to be a way to make Israel, its culture and society, more relevant to American Jews. As academics, we can deal with this challenge by getting students to take non-preprofessional education seriously. Preprofessional courses are supposed to prepare students for specific careers. Non-preprofessional courses are supposed to broaden the cultural breadth of the students. Therefore, any kind of non-preprofessional courses offered by the liberal arts tradition should increase the cultural depth of our students. Whether that liberal arts tradition is in cultural anthropology or whether it is in dance or whether it is in Jewish studies or philosophy or whatever, training in the liberal arts is as crucial for the survival of culture at large as it is for the survival of Judaism. This challenge really requires serious thinking on our part. The creation of new types of academic programs that will expand the social service aspect of one’s academic training is also a part of the broadening of the cultural identity of our students. We should have internships for students that will enable them to develop their social awareness and their concern for culture at large. The Library of Contemporary Jewish Philosophers is a legacy project as well as an educational project. How do you see your intellectual legacy? Well, I’ll hazard a guess. My particular legacy would be to urge Jewish academics and Jewish professionals to recognize that religious consciousness, spiritual consciousness, is at the core of what makes something Jewish. It’s my personal position. I understand there are a lot of people who don’t agree with me, but my position is that spiritual consciousness is at the core of what it means to be Jewish. In this regard I see myself as following in the footsteps of Heschel. I’m not inventing a wheel. Given my understanding of being Jewish, we have to arrange our curricular work, our extra-curricular work, our summer studies work, and so on, so that there is that dimension present in a great deal of what we do. Of course, we have to do other things as well. But, whenever we are engaged in history, literature, or art, at some point we need to come back to the spiritual center, I mean, God, since God

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is at the center. God remains at the center of Jewish life, and all activities done by Jews should ultimately be experienced with that awareness. I think that’s true about philosophy, too, which is why I hope that the concept of philosophic mysticism, about which I have written, will transform the field of medieval philosophy into thinking about the kind of experience that lies behind the philosophic system we’re studying. Whether this will happen or not is another matter. In the field of ethics, we need to get away from preaching and get into the social psychology of obedience and disobedience and protest, and we need to analyze those factors and we need to consciously cultivate what it takes to make students resistant to authority. Because as we look further into the twenty-first century, my children and my grandchildren will, I think, experience the growing pressures of conformity as life flattens due to technology. Technology makes us more conformist. And we need to cultivate the idea that we are individual people, that we are human beings whose personhood cannot be exhausted by, or reduced to, some mechanistic technology. We need to bring that human personalist dimension back as the central model for how we see ourselves, rather than employ technological models. A human being is not like a computer. Yes, human personhood is what freedom is all about; personhood is the seat of human freedom. That is correct. That is the seat of human freedom, absolutely, because God is personhood, or personality. Thank you very much for taking time from your very busy schedule to hold this interview. It sheds light on your notion of living with God at the center, your approach to the Holocaust, your educational work, and your concern about the challenges that face the Jewish people today in Israel and in the Diaspora.

Select Bibliography Books: Medieval Studies 1. The Commentary of R. Hoter Ben Shelomo to the Thirteen Principles of Maimonides. Etudes sur le judaisme médiéval, edited by Georges Vajda, vol. 6. Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1974. 2. (Editor) “Perspectives to the History of Judaism,” section of History, Religion, and Spiritual Democracy: Essays in Honor of Joseph L. Blau, edited by Maurice Wohlgelernter. New York: Columbia University Press, 1980. 3. The Philosophic Questions and Answers of Hoter Ben Shelomo. Etudes sur le judaisme médiéval, edited by Georges Vajda, vol. 11. Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1981. 4. (Editor) Approaches to Judaism in Medieval Times, vol. 1. Chico, CA: Scholars Press, 1984. 5. (Editor) Al-Kitab Al-Muhtawi de Yusuf Al-Basir, text, introduction, and commentary by Georges Vajda. Etudes sur le judaisme médiéval, vol. 12. Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1985. 6. (Editor) Approaches to the Study of Judaism in Medieval Times, vol. 2. Chico, CA: Scholars Press, 1985. 7. (Editor) Approaches to the Study of Judaism in Medieval Times, vol. 3. Chico, CA: Scholars Press, 1988. 8. Philosophic Mysticism: Essays in Rational Religion. Bar Ilan: Bar Ilan University Press, 2006. Issued as e-book. Ramat Gan: Bar Ilan University Press, 2010. Books: Modern Studies 9. Understanding Jewish Mysticism, vol. 1. The Library of Judaic Learning, edited by Jacob Neusner, vol. 2. New York: Ktav Publishing, 1978. Translated into Braille by R. Rubin. New York: Jewish Braille Institute, 1984. 10. Understanding Jewish Mysticism, vol. 2. The Library of Judaic Learning, edited by Jacob Neusner, vol. 4. New York: Ktav Publishing, 1982. Translated into Braille by R. Rubin. New York: Jewish Braille Institute, 1984.

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11. (Editor) Emory Studies on the Holocaust: An Interfaith Inquiry, vol. 1. Atlanta: Emory University, 1985. 12. “. . . And Bring Them Closer to Torah”: The Life and Works of Rabbi Aaron H. Blumenthal. New York: Ktav Publishing, 1986. 13. (Co-Editor with Sue Hanover) Emory Studies on the Holocaust: An Interfaith Inquiry, vol. 2. Atlanta: Emory University, 1988. 14. God at the Center. San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1988. Reprinted, Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson, 1994. Published in French as Dieu au Coeur, translated by H. Krief. Paris: Le Cerf, 2002. 15. Facing the Abusing God: A Theology of Protest. Louisville: Westminster/ John Knox, 1993. 16. The Banality of Good and Evil: Moral Lessons from the Shoah. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 1999. Published in French as La Banalité du bien et du mal, translated by A. Blum. Paris: Le Cerf, 2009. 17. (Editor) Yankele: A Holocaust Survivor’s Bittersweet Memoir, by Alex Gross. Alabama: University Press of America, 2001. Essays: Contemporary Theological Reflections 18. “Religion and the Religious Intellectuals: The Case of Medieval Judaism.” In Take Judaism For Example, edited by Jacob Neusner, 117–42. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983. 19. “Creation: What Difference Does It Make.” In God and Creation, edited by David Burrell and Bernard McGinn, 154–72. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1990. http://www.js.emory.edu/BLUMENTHAL/ images/Creation%20-%20Difference.pdf. 20. “Dealing with Unsystematic Theology.” In Facing the Abusing God: A Theology of Protest, chap. 5. Louisville: Westminster/John Knox, 1993. http://www.js.emory.edu/BLUMENTHAL/Dealing%20with%20Unsystematic%20Theology.htm. 21. “Holiness as a Quality of God and Humans.” In Facing the Abusing God: A Theology of Protest, chap. 3. Louisville: Westminster/John Knox, 1993. http://www.js.emory.edu/BLUMENTHAL/Holiness%20as% 20a%20Quality%20of%20God%20and%20Humans.htm. 22. “Personality as a Quality of God and Humans.” In Facing the Abusing God: A Theology of Protest, chap. 2. Louisville: Westminster/John Knox, 1993. http://www.js.emory.edu/BLUMENTHAL/Personality%20as%20 a%20Quality%20of%20God%20and%20Humans.htm. 23. “Toward Being a Theologian.” In Facing the Abusing God: A Theology of Protest, chap. 1. Louisville: Westminster/John Knox, 1993. http://www

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.js.emory.edu/BLUMENTHAL/Toward%20Being%20a%20Theologian .htm. 24. “Universes of Discourse in Theology.” In Facing the Abusing God: A Theology of Protest, chap. 4. Louisville: Westminster/John Knox, 1993. http://www.js.emory.edu/BLUMENTHAL/Universes%20of%20Dis course%20in%20Theology.htm. 25. “Repentance and Forgiveness.” Cross Currents (Spring 1998): 75–81. Reprinted in Journal of Religion and Abuse (2005): 69–76. http://www .js.emory.edu/BLUMENTHAL/Repentance.html. 26. “Despair and Hope in Post-Shoah Jewish Life.” Bridges: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Theology, Philosophy, History, and Science 6, no. 3/4 (1999): 1–18. Reprinted in The Genocidal Temptation: Auschwitz, Hiroshima, Rwanda, and Beyond, edited by Robert S. Frey, 173–86. Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 2003. http://www.js.emory .edu/BLUMENTHAL/DespairHope.html. 27. “Tselem: Toward an Anthropopathic Theology of Image.” In Christianity in Jewish Terms, edited by Tikva Frymer-Kensky, et al., 337–47. Oxford: Westview Press, 2000. http://www.js.emory.edu/BLUMEN THAL/image2.html. Essays on Prayer 28. “Kavvana: The Art of Jewish Prayer.” Adapted from God at the Center, 186–90. San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1988. Reprinted, Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson, 1994. Also adapted from Facing the Abusing God: A Theology of Protest, 176–78. Louisville: Westminster/John Knox, 1993. Published in French as “Kavvana: l’art de prière juive,” translated by Gabrielle Séd-Rajna. La vie spirituelle (1998): 279–84. http://www .js.emory.edu/BLUMENTHAL/Kavvana,%20The%20Art%20of%20 Jewish%20Prayer.htm. 29. “I Prayed Next to a Survivor” (poem). In Emory Studies on the Holocaust, vol. 2, edited by David Blumenthal and Sue Hanover, ii–iii. Atlanta: Emory University, 1988. Reprinted in Peace Prayers, edited by Carrie Leadingham et al., 57–58. San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1992. “Hitpallalti le-Yad ‘Ehad ha-Nitsolim” (original Hebrew). Siah Mesharim 10, no. 9. Reprinted in Emory Studies on the Holocaust, vol. 2, i. http://www.js.emory.edu/BLUMENTHAL/images/Praying%20w%20 Survivor.pdf. 30. “A Spiritual Guide for the Jewish Patient.” In Voices in Our Midst: Spiritual Resources, edited by G. R. Gary, 37–40. Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1996.

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31. “Praying Ashrei: A Web-Based Essay.” http://www.js.emory.edu/BLU MENTHAL/AshreiArticle.html. Originally published as “Psalm 145: A Liturgical Reading.” In Hesed Ve-Emet: Studies in Honor of Ernest S. Frerichs, edited by Jodi Magness and Seymour Gitin, 13–35. Atlanta, Scholars Press: 1998. 32. “The Kaddish.” Judaism 50, no. 1 (Winter 2001): 35–51. Published in French as “Le Kaddish, la prière juive pour les morts,” La vie spirituelle (September 2000): 539–62. Short version, Jewish Spectator (Fall 2001): 29–36. http://www.js.emory.edu/BLUMENTHAL/Kaddish.html. 33. “Liturgies of Anger.” Cross Currents (Summer 2002): 178–99. http:// www.js.emory.edu/BLUMENTHAL/Liturgies%20of%20Anger.html. 34. “Make Them as Tumbleweed.” In Strike Terror No More: Theology, Ethics, and the New War, edited by Jon Berquist, 130–37. St. Louis: Chalice Press, 2002. http://www.js.emory.edu/BLUMENTHAL/Tumbleweed .html. 35. “Praying the Prayerbook.” http://www.js.emory.edu/BLUMENTHAL/ PrayingthePrayerbook.html. 36. “Pondering the Prayerbook.” http://www.js.emory.edu/BLUMEN THAL/PonderingthePrayerbook.html. 37. “Mystical Meditation on the Prayerbook.” http://www.js.emory.edu/ BLUMENTHAL/mysticalmeditation.htm. Essays on the Abusing God 38. “Who Is Battering Whom?” Conservative Judaism 45, no. 3 (Spring 1993): 72–89. http://www.js.emory.edu/BLUMENTHAL/Battering.html. 39. “Angesichts des missbrauchenden Gottes: Eine Protesttheologie.” Dialogue 20 (Dec. 1995): 5–21. http://www.js.emory.edu/BLUMENTHAL/ Angesichts.html. 40. “Confronting the Character of God: Text and Praxis.” In God in the Fray: A Tribute to Walter Brueggemann, edited by Tod Linafelt and Timothy Beal, 38–51. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1998. http://www .js.emory.edu/BLUMENTHAL/Brueggemann2.html. 41. “Theodicy: Dissonance in Theory and Praxis.” Concilium 1 (1998): 95–106. http://www.js.emory.edu/BLUMENTHAL/Theodicy.html. 42. “Emil Fackenheim: Theodicy and the Tikkun of Protest.” In The Philosopher as Witness: Fackenheim and Responses to the Holocaust, edited by Michael Morgan and Benjamin Pollack, 105–16. Albany: SUNY Press, 2008. http://www.js.emory.edu/BLUMENTHAL/Fackenheim.html.

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Essays on the Banality of Good and Evil 43. “The Banality of Good and Evil: A Descriptive-Analytic and a Prescriptive-Normative Reflection.” In Good and Evil After Auschwitz: Ethical Implications for Today, edited by Jack Bemporad, et al., 285–99. Hoboken: Ktav Publishing, 2000. Translated into French, German, and Italian. http://www.js.emory.edu/BLUMENTHAL/Banality1.html. 44. “How to Do Good: Links to Prosocial Sites.” May 2000. http://www .js.emory.edu/BLUMENTHAL/prosociallinks.html. 45. “What To Do: Approaches to Post-Holocaust Education.” In Humanity at the Limit, edited by Michael A. Signer, 355–69. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000. http://www.js.emory.edu/BLUMENTHAL/ WhatToDo.html. 46. “Perpetrators and Rescuers: The Two Key Factors.” In Remembering for the Future: The Holocaust in an Age of Genocide, edited by John Roth and Elisabeth Maxwell, vol. 2, 217–29. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001. http://www.js.emory.edu/BLUMENTHAL/PerpetratorsandRescuers .html. 47. “How Might Another Holocaust Be Prevented.” Abbreviated version, Joseph and Rebecca Meyerhoff Annual Lecture, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, October 2008. Expanded version, Kristallnacht Commemoration, Toronto (Canada), November 9, 2009. Translated into French, Revue d’éthique et de théologie morale 259 (June 2010): 31–51. http://www.js.emory.edu/BLUMENTHAL/Hol%20 Prevention.htm. 48. “Resistance as Happiness” (under consideration). Essays on Medieval Philosophy 49. “A Comparative Table of the Bombay, Cairo, and Beirut Editions of the Rasa’il ‘Ikhwan Al-Safa’.” Arabica 21 (1974): 186–203. 50. “Peirush Ratsionalisti le-Qeta‌‘im mi-Pirqei de-Rabbi ‘Eli‘ezer.” Tarbiz 48 (1978): 99–106. 51. “Ezekiel’s Vision Seen through the Eyes of a Philosophic Mystic.” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 47 (1979): 417–27. Reprinted in Philosophic Mysticism: Essays in Rational Religion, chap. 10. Ramat Gan: Bar Ilan University Press, 2005. 52. “Was There an Eastern Tradition of Maimonidean Scholarship?” Revue des Etudes Juives 138 (1979): 57–68.

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53. “An Example of Ismaili Influence in Post-Maimonidean Yemen.” In Studies in Judaism and Islam Presented to S. D. Goitein, edited by Shelomo Morag, et al., 155–74. Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1981. 54. “The Complexification of the Pleroma in Medieval Judaism: Lovejoy’s Great Chain of Being and the Medieval Jewish Tradition.” Niv Hamidrashia (Jerusalem): 80–91. Reprinted in Jacob’s Ladder and the Tree of Life, edited by Marion L. Kuntz and Paul G. Kuntz, 179–90. Bern and New York: Peter Lang, 1986. http://www.js.emory.edu/ BLUMENTHAL/Lovejoy.htm. 55. (Translator) “Maimonides’ The Thirteen Principles of the Faith.” http://www.js.emory.edu/BLUMENTHAL/Maimonides’%20Princi ples%20(DRB).pdf. Essays on Jewish Mysticism 56. “Maimonides’ Intellectualist Mysticism and the Superiority of the Prophecy of Moses.” Studies in Medieval Culture 10 (1977): 51–68. Reprinted in Approaches to Judaism in Medieval Times, vol. 1, 27–52. Chico: Scholars Press, 1984. Also reprinted in Philosophic Mysticism: Essays in Rational Religion, chap. 3. Ramat Gan: University Press, 2006. http://www.js.emory.edu/BLUMENTHAL/intellectualist%20mysti cism.htm. 57. “Commentary to Pirkei Heikhalot.” Based on Understanding Jewish Mysticism, vol. 1, chaps. 4–5. New York: Ktav Publishing, 1978. Published on the Ascent to the Merkava website: http://people.ucalgary .ca/~elsegal/Rels463/Palaces/Palace1.html. 58. “Commentary to Sefer Yetsira.” Based on Understanding Jewish Mysticism, vol. 1, chap. 3. New York: Ktav Publishing, 1978. Published on Servants of the Light website: http://www.servantsofthelight.org/QBL/ Index.html. 59. “The Creator and the Computer: A Web-Based Essay.” http://www .js.emory.edu/BLUMENTHAL/CreatorandComputer.html. Print version in Understanding Jewish Mysticism, vol. 1, 122–29. New York: Ktav Publishing, 1978. Expanded in History, Religion, and Spiritual Democracy: Essays in Honor of Joseph L. Blau, edited by Maurice Wohlgelernter, 114–29. New York: Columbia University Press, 1980. 60. “Maimonides: Prayer, Worship, and Mysticism.” In Priere, Mystique, et Judaisme, edited by Roland Goetschel, 89–106. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1987. Reprinted in Approaches to Judaism in Medieval

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Times, 1–16. Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1988. Also reprinted in Philosophic Mysticism: Essays in Rational Religion, chap. 4. Ramat Gan: Bar Ilan University Press, 2006. http://www.js.emory.edu/BLUMENTHAL/ MaimMyst.html. 61. “Croyance et attributes essentiels dans la théologie médiévale et moderne.” Revue des études juives, 152 (1994): 415–23. http://www.js.emory. edu/BLUMENTHAL/Croyance.html. 62. “Creating Zoharic Texts.” Conservative Judaism 49, no. 4 (Summer 1997): 59–68. 63. “Philosophic Mysticism: The Ultimate Goal of Medieval Judaism.” In Esoteric and Exoteric Aspects in Judeo-Arabic Culture, edited by Benjamin Hary and Haggai Ben-Shammai, 1–18. Leiden: Brill, 2006. Reprinted in Philosophic Mysticism: Essays in Rational Religion, chapter 5. Ramat Gan: Bar Ilan University Press, 2006. http://www .js.emory.edu/BLUMENTHAL/PhilMyst.html. 64. “Maimonides’ Philosophic Mysticism.” In Maimonides and Mysticism, edited by Avraham Elqayam and Daniel Schwartz, Daat 64–66 (2009): 5–25. Reprinted in Philosophic Mysticism: Essays in Rational Religion, chap. 6. Ramat Gan: Bar Ilan University Press, 2006. http://www .js.emory.edu/BLUMENTHAL/PM2.5.html. Essays on the Shoah 65. “In the Shadow of the Holocaust.” Jewish Spectator (Winter 1981): 11–14. Reprinted in expanded form as “Memory and Meaning in the Shadow of the Holocaust.” In Emory Studies on the Holocaust, 114–22. Atlanta: Emory University, 1985. http://www.js.emory.edu/BLUMENTHAL/ MemoryMeaning.htm. 66. “Of All Small Things. . . .” Judaism 30 (1981): 247–48. http://www .js.emory.edu/BLUMENTHAL/images/Of%20All%20Small%20Things .pdf. 67. “A Midrash on Psalm 44:10–15.” In Facing the Abusing God: A Theology of Protest, 99–100. Louisville: Westminster/John Knox, 1993. http:// www.js.emory.edu/BLUMENTHAL/MidrashPs44.html. 68. “Auschwitz and Hiroshima: Icons of Our Century.” In The Genocidal Temptation: Auschwitz, Hiroshima, Rwanda, and Beyond, edited by Robert S. Frey, 241–56. Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 2003. http://www.js.emory.edu/BLUMENTHAL/HolocAndHirosh.html.

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69. “Cross Disciplinary Notes on the Teaching of the Shoah: Four Questions for Most Holocaust Classes.” In Testimony, Tensions, and Tikkun: Teaching the Holocaust in Colleges and Universities, edited by Myrna Goldenberg and Rochelle Millen, 160–71. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2007. http://www.js.emory.edu/BLUMENTHAL/Four%20 Questions.htm. 70. “Beware Your Beliefs.” In Anguished Hope: Holocaust Scholars Confront the Palestinian-Israeli Conflict, edited by Leonard Grob and John Roth, 50–67. Grand Rapids: Eedermans, 2008. http://www.js.emory.edu/ BLUMENTHAL/Palestinian%20Conflict.htm. 71. “How Might Another Shoah Be Prevented?” Conservative Judaism 64, no. 4 (Summer 2013): 90–109. Essays: Biblical Studies 72. “A Play on Words in the Nineteenth Chapter of Job.” Vetus Testamentum 16 (1966): 497–501. http://www.js.emory.edu/BLUMENTHAL/ images/Play%20on%20Words%20in%20Job.pdf. 73. “Four Commentaries to Psalm 128.” Facing the Abusing God, chaps, 6–7. Louisville: Westminster/John Knox, 1993. 74. “Four Commentaries to Psalm 44.” Facing the Abusing God, chap. 8. Louisville: Westminster/John Knox, 1993. 75. “Four Commentaries to Psalm 109.” Facing the Abusing God, chap. 9. Louisville: Westminster/John Knox, 1993. 76. “Four Commentaries to Psalm 27.” Facing the Abusing God, chap. 10. Louisville: Westminster/John Knox, 1993. 77. “Where God Is Not: The Book of Esther and Song of Songs.” Judaism 95 (1995): 80–92. http://www.js.emory.edu/BLUMENTHAL/Esther%20 and%20Song.htm. 78. “Reading Genesis: A Web-Based Essay.” http://www.js.emory.edu/ BLUMENTHAL/GenIntro.html. Originally published as “Reading Creation,” Bibel und Midrasch. Forschung zum Alten Testament, edited by Gerhard Bodendorfer and Matthias Millard, vol. 22, 117–66. Tubingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1998. Essays: Interfaith Studies 79. “The Place of Faith and Grace in Judaism.” Austin: Center for JudaicChristian Studies, 1985. Reprinted in A Time to Speak: The Evangelical-

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Jewish Encounter, edited by A. James Rudin and Marvin R. Wilson, 104–14. Austin: Center for Judaic-Christian Studies, 1987. 80. “Abraham Joshua Heschel: The Inadequacy of the Ecumenical Perspective.” Journal of Ecumenical Studies 29 (1992): 249–53. http://www .js.emory.edu/BLUMENTHAL/images/Heschel-%20Inadequacy.pdf. 81. “Three Is Not Enough: Jewish Reflections on Trinitarian Thinking.” In Ethical Monotheism, Past and Present: Essays in Honor of Wendell S. Dietrich, edited by Theodore Vial and Mark Hadley, 181–95. Providence: Brown Judaic Studies, 2001. http://www.js.emory.edu/ BLUMENTHAL/Trinity.html. 82. “On the Death of John Paul II.” Religious News Service. April 7, 2005. http://www.js.emory.edu/BLUMENTHAL/After%20JPII.htm. 83. “Essays in Christian-Jewish Dialogue.” 2008. http://www.js.emory.edu/ BLUMENTHAL/Essays%20in%20Christian-Jewish%20Dialogue.htm. 84. “Evangelicals and Catholics Together on Law: Jewish Theological and Practical Concerns.” Journal of Christian Legal Thought 3, no. 2 (Fall 2013): 11–12. Essays: Cultural Studies 85. “Religion and the Religious Intellectuals: The Case of Medieval Judaism.” In Take Judaism for Example, edited by Jacob Neusner, 117–42. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983. 86. “Jewish Perspectives on Poverty.” In Rethinking the Nature of Poverty, edited by Nancy Kason, 51–56. Atlanta: University of Georgia, 1994. Translated from the Spanish edition, 1991. http://www.js.emory.edu/ BLUMENTHAL/images/Poverty.pdf. 87. “Michael Wyschogrod, Interpreter of Judaism in the Late Twentieth Century.” In Interpreters of Judaism in the Late Twentieth Century, edited by Steven Katz, 393–405. Washington: B’nai B’rith, 1993. http:// www.js.emory.edu/BLUMENTHAL/images/Wyschogrod.pdf. 88. “Jacob B. Agus as a Student of Medieval Jewish Philosophy and Mysticism.” In American Rabbi: The Life of Jacob B. Agus, edited by Steven Katz, 85–108. New York: New York University Press, 1997. 89. “Salvador Dali: ‘Aliyah, the Rebirth of Israel’—Introduction and Commentary.” 2010, updated 2013. http://www.js.emory.edu/BLUMENTHAL/Salvador%20Dali%20Aliyah.htm. 90. “Israeli and Topical Judaica Philately—Essays and Papers.” Revised version, November 5, 2013. http://www.js.emory.edu/BLUMENTHAL/ Philatlely.html.

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91. “From Medieval Mystic to Madonna: The Strange Path of ‘Im Nin‘alu’ ” (under consideration). Essays: Autobiographical 92. “What I Believe.” Commentary (August 1996): 23–24. http://www .js.emory.edu/BLUMENTHAL/Belief.html. 93. “From Anger to Inquiry.” In From the Unthinkable to the Unavoidable, edited by Carol Rittner and John Roth, 149–55. Westport, CT: Praeger, 1997. http://www.js.emory.edu/BLUMENTHAL/AngerInquiry.html. 94. “From Wissenschaft to Theology: A Mid-Life Re-Calling.” In Selving: Linking Work to Spirituality, edited by William Cleary, 102–12. Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 2000. http://www.js.emory.edu/ BLUMENTHAL/WissToTheol.html. Book Reviews 95. Letters of Medieval Traders, by S. D. Goiten. Jewish Social Studies 36 (1975): 336–38. 96. Mystical Dimensions of Islam, by Annemarie Schimmel. International Journal for Philosophy and Religion 10 (1977): 265–68. 97. The Sunflower, by Simon Wiesenthal. First edition, Jewish Social Studies 40 (1978): 330–32. Revised edition, http://www.js.emory.edu/BLUMENTHAL/bookreviews/Sunflower%20II.html. 98. Your Word Is Fire, by Arthur Green and Barry Holtz. Journal of Mystical Studies 2 (1979): 95. 99. Kosmologie und Heilslehre der frühen islamischen Gnosis, by Heinz Halm. Die Welt des Islams 20 (1980): 116–17. 100. Introduction to the Code of Maimonides, by Isadore Twersky. Jewish Social Studies 32 (1981): 108–12. 101. Piety and Society, by Ivan Marcus. Jewish Quarterly Review 73 (1982): 87–89. 102. The Body of Faith, by Michael Wyschogrod. AJS Review 11 (1986): 116–21. 103. A Living Covenant, by David Hartman. AJS Review 12 (1987): 298–305. 104. Deux traités de mystique juive, by Paul Fenton. Revue des etudes juives 148, no. 3–4 (1989): 418–20. 105. The Altruistic Personality, by Samuel Oliner and Pearl Oliner. Critical Review of Books In Religion 3 (1990): 409–10.

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106. Creation and the Persistence of Evil, by Jon Levenson. Modern Judaism 10 (1990): 105–10. 107. Hitler’s Justice: The Courts in the Third Reich, by Ingo Müller. Modern Judaism 23 (1993): 95–106. 108. Seek My Face, Speak My Name, by Arthur Green. Modern Theology 9, no. 2 (1993): 223–25. 109. Intertextuality and the Reading of Midrash, by Daniel Boyarin. CCAR Journal (Summer/Fall 1995): 81–83. 110. The Death and Resurrection of the Beloved Son, by Jon Levenson. Revue des études juives, 160, no. 1–2 (2001): 265–68. 111. Marriage, Divorce, and the Abandoned Wife in Jewish Law, by Michael Broyde. Conservative Judaism 54, no. 2 (2002): 90–92. 112. Proverbs of Ashes: Redemptive Suffering, and the Search for What Saves Us, by Rita Brock and Rebecca Parker. Journal of Religion and Abuse 4, no. 2 (2002): 75–80. 113. Unsettled: An Anthropology of the Jews, by Melvin Konner. Conservative Judaism 56, no. 4 (2004): 92–93. 114. The Bones Reassemble: Reconstituting Liturgical Speech, by Catherine Madsen. Reviews in Theology and Religion 13, no. 2 (2006): 197–99. 115. Heavenly Torah as Refracted Through the Generations, by Abraham Joshua Heschel, edited and translated by Gordon Tucker. Reviews in Theology and Religion 13, no. 1 (2006): 136–41. 116. Maimonides’ Confrontation with Mysticism, by Menachem Kellner. Reviews in Theology and Religion 14, no. 2 (2007): 253–57. 117. The Binding of Isaac: Mystical and Philosophical Interpretations of the Bible (Hebrew), by Alexander Even-Chen. Reviews in Religion and Theology 15, no. 2 (2008): 269–82. 118. Siddur B’Chol L’vav’cha: With All Your Heart and Siddur Sha’ar Zahav. Reviews in Religion and Theology 17, no. 3 (2010): 341–44. 119. Maimonides’ Cure of Souls: Medieval Precursor of Psychoanalysis, by David Bakan, Dan Merkur, and David Weiss. Reviews in Religion and Theology 18, no. 2 (2011): 176–81. 120. As Light Before Dawn: The Inner World of a Medieval Kabbalist, by Eitan Fishbane. Spiritus, 11, no. 1 (2011): 133–35.