Exile and Restoration in Jewish Thought : an Essay in Interpretation. 9781441101372, 1441101373

Table of contents :
Contents
Preface
Abbreviations
Introduction
1 Beginnings
2 Forged in Exile
3 Tradition and Intuition
4 Modernity
5 Revelation
6 Relation
7 Realms of Redemption
8 Epilogue
Bibliography
Index
A
B
C
D
E
F
G
H
I
J
K
L
M
N
O
P
Q
R
S
T
U
V
W
Y
Z

Citation preview

Exile and Restoration in Jewish Thought

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Exile and Restoration in Jewish Thought An Essay in Interpretation

Ralph Keen

Continuum Continuum International Publishing Group The Tower Building 11 York Road London SE1 7NX

80 Maiden Lane Suite 704 New York NY 10038

© Ralph Keen 2009 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN 10: HB: 0-8264-5308-2 ISBN 13: HB: 978-0-8264-5308-2

Library of Congress Cataloguing-in-Publication Data To come Typeset by Free Range Book Design & Production Ltd Printed and bound in Great Britain by

CONTENTS

Preface

vii

Abbreviations

ix

Introduction

1

1 Beginnings

13

2 Forged in Exile

27

3 Tradition and Intuition

45

4 Modernity

61

5 Revelation

79

6 Relation

97

7 Realms of Redemption

116

8 Epilogue

135

Bibliography

139

Index

163

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PREFACE

This work is more synthesis than survey: thematic coherence rather than comprehensive coverage has been the dominant concern. The thesis is a simple one: the Jewish intellectual tradition as refracted through religious and philosophical texts represents a body of reflection on benevolent divine sovereignty composed amid circumstances in which evidence of such goodness is largely or wholly absent. Conditioned by adversity and hope, this tradition anticipates certain schools of contemporary Continental philosophy, whose categories of interpretation offer useful explanatory principles for the broad trajectory of Jewish thought. Intended for readers with a working knowledge of Continental philosophy and at least some familiarity with Jewish history, this book is an exercise in the history of ideas. It is one thing to hold, as I do, that any reconstruction of thought is likely to be worthless unless it is grounded in a knowledge of the languages of the texts; it is quite another to expect (which I do not) that one’s reader should be equally conversant or even interested in philological and historical minutiae. Since this work is meant to be an invitation to further inquiry, we have striven to limit our treatment to works available in English and to minimize summaries and wearisome technicalities, while at the same time offering in the notes some references to more specialized studies. The debts that have accumulated during my time with this small project are numerous and varied. They include the students in my undergraduate courses in Jewish thought at the University of Iowa; the audience at the April 2005 Bridwell Judaica Lecture at Southern Methodist University (and especially my gracious hosts, David and Valerie Hotchkiss Price); participants at sessions of the Association of Jewish Studies and the American Society for Eighteenth Century Studies who offered useful responses to my papers; and graduate students who became my mentors without intending to, especially Nathan Eric Dickman and Janeta Fong Tansey. Asher Biemann’s perceptive guidance untangled organizational knots just when they were threatening the whole story, and Jon Levenson’s careful reading saved me from numerous wrrors. David Klemm has been a colleague and a mentor in more ways than he imagines. And the Obermann Center for Advanced Studies at the University of Iowa, under the extraordinary leadership of Jay Semel, offered ideal conditions for research and writing.

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ABBREVIATIONS

AHR AJSR AS BCJ BI BJS CCEMP CCMJP CEMP CHB CHJ CJ EJ2 EJM GL GQ H&T HJ HJP HTR

American Historical Review AJS [Association of Jewish Studies] Review ArtScroll Tanach Series, ed. Nosson Scherman and Meir Zlotowitz. Brooklyn, NY: Mesorah Publications. The Blackwell Companion to Judaism, ed. Jacob Neusner and Alan J. Avery-Peck. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2003. Biblical Interpretation. Leiden: E. J. Brill. Brown Judaic Studies The Cambridge Companion to Early Modern Philosophy, ed. Donald Rutherford. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. The Cambridge Companion to Modern Jewish Philosophy, ed. Michael L. Morgan and Peter Eli Gordon. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. A Companion to Early Modern Philosophy, ed. Steven Nadler. Oxford: Blackwell, 2002. The Cambridge History of the Bible, ed. P. R. Ackroyd et al., 3 vols. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1963–70. The Cambridge History of Judaism, ed. W. D. Davies and L. Finkelstein. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984. Cultures of the Jews, ed. David Biale. 3 vols. New York: Schocken Books, 2002. The Encyclopaedia of Judaism, Second Edition, ed. Jacob Neusner et al. 4 vols. Leiden: Brill, 2005. Études sur le Judaïsme Médiéval. Leiden: E. J. Brill. The German Library, ed. Volkmar Sander. New York: Continuum. German Quarterly History and Theory Historical Journal History of Jewish Philosophy, ed. Daniel H. Frank and Oliver Leaman; Routledge History of World Philosophies, 2. London and New York: Routledge, 2003. Harvard Theological Review

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JAAR JBL JBR JHI JM

Journal of the American Academy of Religion Journal of Biblical Literature Journal of Bible and Religion Journal of the History of Ideas Joseph Dan, Jewish Mysticism, 4 vols. Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson, 1998–99. The Jew in the Modern World: A Documentary History, ed. Paul Mendes-Flohr and Jehuda Reinharz, 2nd edn. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995. Journal of Philosophy Jewish Quarterly Review Journal of Religion Journal for the Study of the Old Testament Jewish Spirituality, 2 vols, ed. Arthur Green. New York: Crossroad, 1996–97. Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press Littman Library of Jewish Civilization Modern Judaism Midrash Rabbah, tr. H. Freedman and Maurice Simon. 10 vols. London: Soncino Press, 1939. New German Critique The Oxford Handbook of Jewish Studies, ed. Martin Goodman, Jeremy Cohen, and David Sorkin. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. Proceedings of the American Academy for Jewish Research Philosophische Bibliothek. Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research Philosophical Review A Rabbinic Anthology, ed. C. G. Montefiore and H. Loewe. New York: Schocken Books, 1974. Chumash … and Rashi’s Commentary, 5 vols., ed. A. M. Silbermann. Jerusalem: Silbermann Family, 1934. Studies in Spirituality Theologisches Wörterbuch zum Alten Testament, 10 vols., ed. G. Johannes Botterweck and Helmer Ringgren. Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1973–2000. Vigiliae Christianae Vetus Testamentum Wörterbuch der phänomenologischen Begriffe, ed. Helmuth Vetter et al. PhB 555. Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 2005. Yale Judaica Series

JMW JP JQR JR JSOT JS LCL LLJC MJ MR NGC OHJS PAAJR PhB PPR PR RA Rashi StSpir TWAT VC VT WPhB YJS

INTRODUCTION

THE OLD ALIENATION AND THE NEW Medieval Judaism confronted modernity abruptly in the eighteenth century.1 The transitional period from the invention of printing to the Enlightenment brought few upheavals to a Jewry still largely isolated from the gentile mainstream. An orderly progression of political and cultural events which might explain the dawn of secular modernity in the dominant culture had very few corresponding developments among the Jewish communities of Europe. Modernity arrived, like an abrupt change of seasons, suddenly and unexpectedly. The details behind such a sweeping generalization are complex and elusive. European Jewry experienced ‘early modernity’ in its own way: the invention of printing, the emergence of constitutional states, and the extension of the sciences beyond their medieval theological confines all had an impact on Jewish life.2 The fact remained, however, that prescribed marginality was a fact of life for most Jews until the beginnings of emancipation in the eighteenth century.3 Yet the secularization of public life that made it possible for Jews to enjoy a measure of civil equality imposed new constraints on a culture which, like medieval Christendom, found compartmentalizing sacred and secular realms an uncomfortably challenging demand. Insularity took two forms in early modern Jewish communities, and distinct cultural traits emerged from each set of conditions. Within mercantile cities Jews occupied a subordinate but fixed place: set off within their own neighborhoods, they participated in the activities of the larger environment, often serving in influential roles in court and commerce. Laws in place since the middle ages restricted involvement in professional life, but outside of these realms Jews flourished sufficiently to sustain an alternate bourgeoisie. A different social organization prevailed in the less cosmopolitan communities. Possibly more independent in their greater isolation, the Jewish villages of the countryside were overshadowed by a Christian aristocracy intent on minimizing Jewish interactions with gentiles. Conceiving of history as a series of states of exile had been a conditioned pattern of Jewish thought. The Patriarchal narratives of wanderings, beginning with the expulsion from Eden and followed by multigenerational sojourns and

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temporary settlements in others’ lands, came to an end with the settlement of Canaan and the fulfillment of a divine promise of a land of freedom and prosperity. Assurance of God’s promise thus reinforced, the Babylonian Exile of the sixth century BCE revealed the cost of failing to adhere to the terms of the covenant between the people Israel and the biblical deity. Fifty years under barbarous occupation demonstrated that God meant business, and that the benefits of the promise were contingent on strict adherence to the demands of Torah.4 In creating a tension between divine trustworthiness and human failings, Jewish thinkers became conditioned to interpreting worldly events as signs of divine favor and disfavor.5 The biblical God, believed to be sovereign over all peoples, was understood to manipulate the course of history to the benefit or disadvantage of the Jews according to their desserts. Hence the Roman conquest of Jerusalem in the first century CE fit a ready-made historical explanation: as in the first exile, something had gone egregiously wrong, and God was using the Roman Empire as a rod of divine wrath to signal divine displeasure.6 And, as in the Babylonian dispersion, the path toward restoration lay in intensified dedication to God, either through works of benevolence or study of the divine Law – of course preferably both. One discerns in Jewish writings of the Diaspora a persistent juxtaposition of the unchangeable and the unstable. Fixed was the promise of redemption and restoration to Zion – in short, divine righteousness. The impermanent was all existence outside of the Promised Land, vulnerability to the vagaries of other nations’ interests. Within the realized promise of cultural autonomy was an ever-present sense that God was holding Israel accountable for meeting the conditions that gave purpose to the people’s freedom in the first place and explained current adversity. In the alienated state the hope of restoration motivated endurance of hardship and renewed dedication to piety. The temporal aspect is crucial in Diaspora consciousness, since one’s place in history is framed by past and future reference-points, the freedom once enjoyed and the future restoration of that freedom.7 In exile since the first century CE, medieval Jewry suffered waves of adversity: banishment from England in 1290, the pogroms that followed the plague in the late fourteenth century, the expulsions from the Iberian Peninsula in the 1490s, not to mention scores of less famous but equally egregious injustices. Each generation, it began to seem, was taught a new set of lessons in the hostility of the world toward the chosen people; and each generation in turn found new ways, not to strike back, but to regain the favor of their God. Determined trust in the ultimate benevolence of God, and the final vindication of their suffering, marked Jewish observance well into the modern era. Possibly apocryphal but revealing is the story in which a monarch, either Louis XIV of France or the Prussian emperor Frederick II (there are two versions of the story), asked a wise Christian, either Blaise Pascal or a Lutheran court chaplain, for proof of God’s sovereignty, and got the simple answer: ‘The Jews, Your Majesty.’8

Introduction

3

The Protestant Reformation, or more exactly its aftermath, was a catalyst in the liberalizing of policies toward the Jews. In the wake of the Wars of Religion in France, the Civil War in Britain, and the Thirty Years War in Central Europe, the age of Confessionalization gave way to the beginnings of religiously pluralistic states. Very tentative beginnings, to be sure, with guarantees often not kept: but a start, nevertheless, toward some measure of religious freedom.9 No longer were political and religious identities intrinsically conjoined, and although established churches still served the majority (and the ruler’s) confession, citizens and subjects might belong to any of a variety of denominations. Edicts of toleration, however much they differed in details, seemed uniformly to acknowledge that enforcement of piety was not the proper duty of civil governments.10 Gradually and in different ways, Jews emerged from under the cloud of confessional absolutism in the eighteenth century, in part when it became recognized among Christian scholars that Judaism was a self-contained tradition in its own right and not a partial religion that could only be completed by acceptance of Christianity. The dramatist Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, both at the beginning of his career with The Jews (1749) and toward the end with Nathan the Wise (1778–79), offered sympathetic portrayals of a noble humanity among the Jewish people, whose popular image still smarted from the attacks leveled by Martin Luther two centuries before.11 In the allegorical play Nathan, the father has one ring, his most precious heirloom, but three sons. So he has two exact duplicates made, and gives one ring to each son, never indicating which one is the true one. Each son thus might have the authentic heirloom, but must respect the other’s, for either of them may have been the favored one. The play served as a call to reverence among Christians, Jews, and Muslims, and Lessing himself (a friend of Moses Mendelssohn) became the voice of a new spirit of tolerance.12 Unquestionably beneficial as the new attitudes were for overall social harmony, normalizing the Jewish presence in a gentile mainstream brought an unexpected and ironic repercussion. Mitigating the marginality of European Jewry precipitated a division, which continues to this day, between those Jews who embrace the values of an inclusive secular culture and those deeply suspicious of overtures to assimilate. The broader course of history was seen in both instances as evidence of a divine mandate, interpreted – depending on perspective – as either a call to interweave with the non-Jewish mainstream or to resist the enticements of a progressive secular society. Both positions had distinguished precedents, for the meaning of diasporic existence had been the driving concern of some of the most illustrious thinkers of the tradition. And honoring one’s masters, whether recent or distant, was considered one of the defining virtues of the faithful Jew. Assimilation might more accurately be understood as accommodation, for its earliest modern advocates had no concept of being fully absorbed into the dominant culture. Lessing’s friend Mendelssohn stated as much in his Jerusalem, a response of sorts to a pamphlet by Christian von Dohm called

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On the Amelioration of the Civil Status of the Jews.13 Von Dohm, a member of the German Parliament, held in his essay that restricting civil equality was politically and economically counter-productive, and that a secular state needed to be exactly that: secular. Mendelssohn’s response was in essence that Jewishness was a quality manifested in social actions, an attitude toward humanity from which all persons would benefit. His proposal in Jerusalem was radical for its time; Mendelssohn’s notion was that a progressive idea of history demanded an adaptation of Judaism to cultural change.14 More directly, Mendelssohn felt it was time that Jews became psychically domesticated and found their home in the landscape they had already occupied as strangers for so many centuries. Longing for a return to a far-off homeland was an inappropriate use of energy better devoted to playing a constructive role in one’s own environment. Talmudic orthodoxy was thus dealt a modern challenge along the lines of some of the Rabbinic wisdom of the first two centuries CE. In a well-known passage from the Avot of Rabbi Nathan, for example, the ruins of the Second Temple are seen as a sign that God does not want sacrifices, but rather kindness: in Hebrew, hesed.15 Within more traditional circles, the allure of integration was another version of a long-standing temptation and a signal to resist. The collective memory included the story of the ruler Antiochus and the Ptolemaic attempt to absorb Judaism into a pan-Mediterranean Hellenistic civilization. Judas Maccabeus, whose resistance to the Greeks became celebrated in the observance of Hanukkah, was a hero to those later Jews who saw separation from the larger world as a mark of dedication to Torah and the God who revealed it.16 THE EXISTENTIALIST TURN Defining Jewish identity in alien surroundings may thus be termed a constitutive question of Jewish thought; and the need to construct meaning out of an apparent void is rightly associated with modern Existentialism. As with most schools of thought, and not just among philosophical or religious traditions, identifying a system of ideas as Existential raises problems of definition. A passage from The Pickwick Papers, which one can only hope is fictional, has a student undertaking a research project on Chinese metaphysics. Dutifully he finds ‘China’ in the encyclopedia, draws out what he thinks is important, and then does the same for ‘metaphysics,’ with the resulting amalgam being the product of his research. Any historian of one segment of an international movement in the world of ideas can sympathize with Dickens’s apocryphal student, and in our case we do so emphatically, since both Existentialism and Judaism have been vexatiously fluid terms over time. This might be an opportunity for some to indulge in methodological speculations about whether insiders or outsiders are better judges of any given religious tradition, followed by equally tendentious principles intended to allow one to determine the

Introduction

5

boundaries between Existentialism and other branches of modern philosophy. Or one could instead simply indicate that our subject is too difficult to define precisely as well as too important to ignore. The history of the movement explains much. Existentialism grew out of dissatisfaction with the tendency in nineteenth-century philosophy to find an ‘essence’ in the perceived environment, a force or quality determining the course of events large and small, but mostly large, as in national destinies and the presumably inevitable progress of civilization. The lead architect of such architectonic thinking was G. W. F. Hegel, who saw in ‘Spirit’ (or ‘mind’; the German Geist means both) the driving force in all experience.17 Adopted and adapted by legions of followers, the Hegelian system received some of its sharpest criticism in the work of Søren Kierkegaard, the Danish philosopher who studied in Berlin when Hegel’s influence was at its peak. In scathing terms and a style all his own, Kierkegaard argued that the starting-point of all understanding, of self as well as of the world, lay in subjective experience.18 Where this movement broke from its predecessors was the emphasis it placed on the non-rational aspect of such experience. And in this emphasis it became an outcast among philosophical schools until the second half of the twentieth century.19 Philosophical inquiry, along with other disciplines, began to address questions beyond the realm of abstractions which previously had been familiar, comfortable, and academic in the least favorable sense of the term. The conventional definition of Existentialism, as the philosophy that asserts the priority of existence over essence,20 does more harm than good in an environment in which those terms themselves, rooted in an archaic scholasticism, are not clearly understood. Positivism in its various forms has cast shadows of suspicion over metaphysical questions, and even metaphysicians have withdrawn from talking about universals, thus removing the framework for understanding essence.21 Whatever the nuances among different writers may be, one common underpinning of Existentialism is an anthropology that attributes intentionality to the individual subject. That is to say, mental activity is intrinsically directed to an object – an object of understanding, that is, not an entity outside of experience.22 Consciousness is inherently active in the construction of meaning; and understanding emerges from the clear and cogent immanent descriptions of sense perception.23 Questions of meaning (‘existential’ questions defined phenomenologically) are thus to be understood as the fundamental and irreducible functions of mental activity.24 If we stipulate to this definition, a connection between Existentialism and religious thought becomes apparent. The construction of meaning in sources beyond what can be discerned through reason and experience reaches deep into the origins of the spiritual imagination. Resistance to the seeming disorder and absurdity of events has motivated creativity in virtually every form in which it can be found in the West. The primacy of intuition over reason, however, is rarely articulated discursively, for obvious reasons. A rational demonstration of the limits of reason would be self-contradictory. It is perhaps

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for that reason that Pascal, who granted to the emotions their own logic, is considered by some the forerunner of modern Existentialism. We must emphasize that there are two forms of Existentialism, theistic and atheistic; and we are concerned here primarily with the former.25 Theistic Existentialism, a style of thought found at the intersection of philosophy and religious thought (but tending more toward the latter), finds the ground and end of human self-affirmation in a supreme agent. In the simplest terms, this means that the desire for meaning in life is satisfied in a relationship with a divine Other. Such a viewpoint is theistic in the fullest sense of the term insofar as the Other of human self-realization is understood as the personal deity of revelation.26 A transcendent creator and sovereign to whom the material realm is subordinate is one whose will extends as a norm across time. In perceiving that will, however it may be discerned and understood, humans find both their relation to the Other and the goal toward which their own will may be directed. Variations within this schema begin with anthropological differences, and here we mean theological doctrines of the human condition rather than cultural patterns. Assumptions that humans are separate in some way from the rest of the natural realm have generated the full range of constructions, from assertions of sovereign freedom to claims of a servitude so degrading that only a divine redeemer could restore fallen humanity to even a semblance of its primordial state. Between these extremes are various shades of an anthropology in which human freedom and divine will are held in tension. In short, humans possess an unimpaired freedom, often identified as the ‘image and likeness’ that they received from their creator, together with an awareness that there is a proper exercise of that freedom which they did not determine. Both human freedom and the authority of a divine will came under sustained attack in modernity; indeed the language of ‘will,’ whether divine or human, was largely consigned to the realm of primitive myth along with much else that appeared redolent of archaic superstition. The resulting scientific anthropology, dominant at the beginning of the twentieth century, tended to explain human actions in terms of material conditions and laws of behavior, presenting an orderly universe perfect in every respect, perhaps, except for the absence of any possibility for spontaneous creativity. Paradoxical though it may have seemed, the progress of technological civilization was accompanied by a growing sense of unease, articulated most visibly in the discourse of alienation and despair.27 Works such as Unamuno’s The Tragic Sense of Life among Persons and Peoples (1913), Rilke’s 1922 Duino Elegies, and Sartre’s Nausea (1938) are literary evocations of a sense of futility, thematically if not generically linked with Goethe’s Sorrows of Young Werther (1774), though with one salient difference. Whereas Goethe’s was an Olympian spirit who portrayed Werther as a caricature, the twentiethcentury authors were giving voice to their own spirit – if that is the word for it – and that of a substantial portion of their contemporaries.28 In F. H. Heinemann’s words, ‘Existentialism is in all its forms a philosophy of crisis.’29

Introduction

7

If the mood during this period may be described as a sense of loss, attempts at constructive recovery hinged on identifying what it was that was thought to have been lost. Short of a collective lament, the prevailing sentiment among religious writers was nevertheless a clear conviction that more than primitive ritual had been abandoned: the larger meaning of experience, one grounded in the transcendent Other, had also evaporated. Among Christian theologians, Rudolf Bultmann sought to rehabilitate the enduring message, or kerygma, latent within the historically conditioned New Testament narrative; and the prodigiously prolific Karl Barth insisted, as had his antecedents during the Reformation, that the word of God overrode – and was contrary to – the human imagination.30 Within Orthodoxy it was a philosopher rather than a theologian who constructed an eschatology for an age besotted with objectivity: Nikolai Berdyaev.31 Theistic Existentialism is most closely associated with the work of Søren Kierkegaard, whose reflections on the binding of Isaac in Gen. 22 signal a watershed in Western religious thought. In Fear and Trembling (1843) Kierkegaard offers a midrash on the Akedah, little knowing that this very passage is read daily in the synagogue shacharit (morning) service.32 For Kierkegaard, Abraham’s challenge is to believe the preposterous, to trust in a divine promise.33 Setting interpretive terms for the Jewish strand of this philosophical school is unimaginably difficult. As with the broader rubric of Jewish philosophy, questions of authors’ identities, their intended audiences, and the relation of their thought to traditional piety all call for definitions of Judaism that have never been settled – and never will be. Nor is there any hope for clarity in recognizing that, despite the distinct generic characteristics of religious Existentialism, the confessional differentiations that might allow us to distinguish Catholic from Protestant from Eastern Orthodox (and hence also from Jewish) theology are much less evident in Existentialist works than in other forms of modern religious writing. In many cases religious Existentialism sought to transcend its authors’ historical traditions, and whether intentionally or not, this was true of Jewish Existentialist thought as well. Ambiguities aside, some striking commonalities give a thematic coherence to modern Jewish thought, enough to justify calling it a unified body of discourse. Jewish identity, first of all, is understood to be a property with both cultural and religious dimensions: hence Judaism is both an ethnicity and a faith tradition.34 Because of that conjunction, folklore and piety are interwoven in a narrative tradition extending to the legendary origins of humanity found in the Hebrew Bible. Those stories, whether taken literally or figuratively, were felt to originate in a source beyond ordinary cultural creativity: that is to say, they have been considered to be of divine origin, transmitted through selected persons like Moses. And the source of revelation is disclosed within revelation itself, for God’s particular qualities can only be known on God’s own terms. The salient attribute revealed in scripture is one that simultaneously distinguishes the biblical God and provides a unifying identity to the people Israel.

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In very broad terms, the relationship between God and the people is driven by love, an affective bond possibly not present in other ancient religions of the Mediterranean basin. God created the human (Adam) with power over the rest of nature; humanity was said to be made in the ‘image and likeness’ of God (Gen. 1:26) and thus to bear a different relation to God from other creatures. For one thing, this God communicates with persons; and since the biblical God possesses a will (reflected in the act of creation), imparting some knowledge of that will is at least one structural component of the divine–human bond. Another essential element is the privileging of one people as recipients and bearers of that knowledge, charged with protecting it from misuse and subversion by outsiders. The content of this special understanding, finally, is that the sovereign deity is a loving and redemptive god, one whose will is that those qualities be properly recognized; and such recognition can occur only under specific historical conditions. Creation, revelation, redemption: these categories and others are part of the common vocabulary of Christianity and Judaism alike. But the differences in the ways these concepts are used are essential for understanding the critical distinction between the Old Covenant and the New. Without dwelling on questions concerning the systematic organization of Jewish thought, we must indicate one defining doctrine: redemption. Whatever else it may be concerned with, without addressing redemption a work of reflection has at best a weak claim to being included in the tradition of Jewish thought.35 God is known as a redeemer; the redemptive character of divine activity has already been recorded in the scriptural narrative; and the Jewish people, as the beneficiaries of that activity, have a unique and possibly incommunicable understanding of God’s work in history. Redemption is both past and future: unlike the Christian Atonement, the final process has not yet been inaugurated. Until it is, the Jewish people remain separated from their ideal state. Integrating Jewish thought with the broader Existentialist tradition and its forerunners is complicated by the fact that metaphysical terms and categories like ‘being,’ ‘essence,’ and the like are largely foreign to an imagination shaped by Torah. Even the distinction of rational and emotional that is so often taken for granted in secular thought is blurred in a line of discourse which for most of its history was predominantly exegetical, with the evocation of hope being the organizing theme. Questions about ultimate reality and meaning, when they came up at all, jostled against a teleology in which material restoration to a geographical Zion was regarded as the final realization of the divine plan.36 In the following pages we will explore this tension and others, all of which attempt to reconcile the conceptual ideal of the pious tradition – restoration – with the contrasting conditions of historical existence in extended alienation.

Introduction

9

Notes 1

2 3

4 5 6 7 8 9

10 11

12 13 14 15 16

Jacob Katz, ed., Toward Modernity: The European Jewish Model (New Brunswick: Transaction, 1987); Heinz Mosche Graupe, The Rise of Modern Judaism: An Intellectual History of German Jewry, 1650–1942 (Huntington, NY: R. E. Krieger, 1978); Michael A. Meyer, The Origins of the Modern Jew: Jewish Identity and European Culture in Germany, 1749–1824 (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1972); Michael A. Meyer, ‘Modernity as a Crisis for the Jews,’ MJ 9 (1989) 151–64; Arnold Eisen, Rethinking Modern Judaism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998). See Elisheva Carlebach, ‘European Jewry in the Early Modern Period: 1492–1750,’ OHJS 363–75. Howard M. Sachar, A History of the Jews in the Modern World (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2005) 34–50; A. Leland Jamison, ed., Tradition and Change in Jewish Experience (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1978); Arthur Hertzberg, ‘The Emancipation: A Reassessment after Two Centuries,’ MJ 1 (1981) 46–53; for a more general statement of the problem of Jewish identity see also Manfred H. Vogel, ‘The Dilemma of Identity for the Emancipated Jew,’ JBR (now JAAR) 34 (1965) 223–34, reprinted in New Theology No. 4, ed. Martin M. Marty and Dean G. Peerman (New York: Macmillan, 1967) 162–77. For a thorough exploration of the biblical texts, see Peter R. Ackroyd, Exile and Restoration: A Study of Hebrew Thought of the Sixth Century B.C. (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1968), esp. 232–56. Marc Zvi Brettler, ‘Biblical History and Jewish Biblical Theology,’ JR 77 (1977) 563–83. Shaye J. D. Cohen, ‘Josephus, Jeremiah, and Polybius,’ H&T 21 (1982) 366–81. Daniel Boyarin and Jonathan Boyarin, ‘Diaspora: Generation and the Ground of Jewish Identity,’ Critical Inquiry 19 (1993) 693–725. Rudolf Hallo, ‘Christian Hebraists,’ MJ 3 (1983) 95–116; the anecdote appears on p. 110. Jacob Katz, Exclusiveness and Tolerance: Jewish–Gentile Relations in Medieval and Modern Times (New York: Schocken, 1961) 156–81; Geoffrey Adams, The Huguenots and French Opinion, 1685–1787: The Enlightenment Debate on Toleration (Waterloo, Ontario: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 1991). Katz, 182–96. Charlene A. Lea, ‘Tolerance Unlimited: “The Noble Jew” on the German and Austrian Stage (1750–1805),’ GQ 64 (1991) 166–77. The two plays, translated by Ingrid Walsøe-Engel and Bayard Morgan, are available in Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Nathan the Wise, Minna von Barnhelm, and Other Plays and Writings, ed. Peter Demetz, GL 12 (New York: Continuum, 2004) 137–66, 174–275. Heinz Politzer, ‘Lessings Parabel von den drei Ringen,’ GQ 31 (1958) 161–77; Peter R. Erspamer, The Elusiveness of Tolerance: The ‘Jewish Question’ from Lessing to the Napoleonic Wars (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997). A translation of the essay is found in JMW 28–36. For extended context see Edward Breuer, ‘Politics, Tradition, History: Rabbinic Judaism and the Eighteenth-Century Struggle for Civil Equality,’ HTR 85 (1992) 357–83. David Sorkin, ‘The Mendelssohn Myth and Its Method,’ NGC 77 (1999) 7–28; Allan Arkush, ‘The Questionable Judaism of Moses Mendelssohn,’ NGC 77 (1999) 29–44. Hosea 6:6 is the verse elaborated upon in ch. 4 of The Fathers According to Rabbi Nathan, tr. Judah Goldin, YJS 10 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1955); the passage in question is found on p. 34. Solomon Zeitlin, ‘Hanukkah: Its Origin and Its Significance,’ JQR 29 (1938) 1–36; for a survey of Hellenistic Judaism, see Shaye J. D. Cohen, From the Maccabees to the Mishnah (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1989) 37–59.

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17 Robert C. Solomon, ‘Hegel’s Concept of Geist,’ in From Hegel to Existentialism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987) 3–17. 18 Robert C. Solomon, ‘Kierkegaard and Subjective Truth,’ in From Hegel to Existentialism, 72–86; Marjorie Grene, Introduction to Existentialism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1959) 15–40. 19 The emphasis on subjectivity is seen as a form of revolt against a corrupted mainstream by Julius Seelye Bixler, ‘The Contribution of Existenz-Philosophie,’ HTR 33 (1940) 35–63. 20 The formula is found in J.-P. Sartre, Existentialism and Humanism, tr. P. Mairet (London: Methuen, 1966) 26. 21 See Walter Cerf, ‘Logical Positivism and Existentialism,’ Philosophy of Science 18 (1951) 327–38; on the broader tendency away from ontological speculation, see Hans Reichenbach, The Rise of Scientific Philosophy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1951) 117–24; P. F. Strawson, Individuals: An Essay in Descriptive Metaphysics (New York: Doubleday, 1963), esp. 220–55; Karl Popper, Conjectures and Refutations: The Growth of Scientific Knowledge (London and New York: Routledge, 2002) 87–129, 249–71. The anti-metaphysical turn is aptly elucidated (and defended) by D. S. Clarke, Philosophy’s Second Revolution: Early and Recent Analytic Philosophy (Chicago: Open Court, 1997). 22 Franz Brentano, Psychologie vom empirischen Standpunkt, 2 vols. (Leipzig: Felix Meiner, 1924–25); Aron Gurwitsch, ‘Towards a Theory of Intentionality,’ PPR 30 (1970) 354–67; Ben Mijuskovic, ‘Brentano’s Theory of Consciousness,’ PPR 38 (1978) 315–24; Klaus Hedwig, ‘Intention: Outlines for the History of a Phenomenological Concept,’ PPR 39 (1979) 326–40. 23 See Quentin Lauer, Phénoménologie de Husserl: Essai sur la genèse de l’intentionnalité (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1955); Louis Dupré, ‘The Concept of Truth in Husserl’s Logical Investigations,’ PPR 24 (1964) 345–54; James C. Morrison, ‘Husserl and Brentano on Intentionality,’ PPR 31 (1970) 27–46; David Woodruff Smith and Ronald McIntyre, Husserl and Intentionality: A Study of Mind, Meaning, and Language (Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1982); Maurita J. Harney, Intentionality, Sense and the Mind (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1984); Dagfinn Føllesdal, ‘Noema and Meaning in Husserl,’ PPR 50 (Suppl.) (1990) 263–71. It should be noted that there is also a non- (even anti-) phenomenological discourse of intentionality, the leading exponent of which is the analytically oriented John R. Searle; see his Intentionality: An Essay in the Philosophy of Mind (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), esp. 62–66 for his distancing from the Husserlian school. 24 Herbert Spiegelberg, ‘Husserl’s Phenomenology and Existentialism,’ JP 57 (1960) 62–74; and a trenchant response by William Earle, ‘Phenomenology and Existentialism,’ JP 57 (1960) 75–84. Earle’s view, that existentialism is not a pure outgrowth from phenomenology but an eclectic composite of elements drawn from nineteenth-century thinkers and the early twentieth-century phenomenological school, seems especially useful for our understanding of the religious branch of existentialist thought. 25 Both forms are lucidly described in Frederick Copleston, S.J., Contemporary Philosophy: Studies of Logical Positivism and Existentialism (Westminster, MD: Newman Press, 1963) 148–200. See also Maximilian Beck, ‘Existentialism, Rationalism, and Christian Faith,’ JR 26 (1946) 283–95; Francis J. Lescoe, Existentialism: With Or Without God (New York: Alba House, 1974) 4, 6–21; James Edie, ‘Faith as Existential Choice,’ in Christianity and Existentialism, ed. William Earle, James M. Edie, and John Wild (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1963) 3–39. 26 Neil Gillman’s recollection of the first words he heard spoken by Will Herberg conveys a forceful message: Gillman reports that Herberg declared ‘There is only one real philosophical problem: How to counter the absurdity of our existence. On this there are only two possible answers: God, or an idol’ (Introduction to Will Herberg,

Introduction

27

28

29 30

31 32

33

34

35 36

11

Judaism and Modern Man: An Interpretation of Jewish Religion [Woodstock, VT: Jewish Lights, 1997] v). Cf. William Barrett, Irrational Man: A Study in Existential Philosophy (New York: Doubleday, 1962) 45: ‘Modern art thus begins, and sometimes ends, as a confession of spiritual poverty. That is its greatness and its triumph, but also the needle it jabs into the Philistine’s sore spot, for the last thing he wants to be reminded of is his spiritual poverty. In fact, his greatest poverty is not to know how impoverished he is, and so long as he mouths the empty ideals or religious phrases of the past he is but as tinkling brass.’ Richard Kuhns, Structures of Experience: Essays on the Affinity between Philosophy and Literature (New York: Harper, 1974) 177–78: ‘Contemporary literature, dwelling on the fact of death with stupid morbidity, assumes that the tragic is to be found in the violent interruption of death effects, annihilating a promising future and transforming the past into an apparent refuge. … This treatment of death is the opposite of the traditional philosophical one in which life is lived in full awareness of death, and one central concern of life is to embrace death as a natural culmination rather than a violent interruption.’ F. H. Heinemann, Existentialism and the Modern Predicament (New York: Harper, 1958) 167. For samples of these positions see Rudolf Bultmann, ‘The Concept of Revelation in the New Testament,’ in Existence and Faith: Shorter Writings of Rudolf Bultmann, ed. Schubert M. Ogden (Cleveland: World Publishing, 1960) 58–91; Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics, 1.1, tr. G. W. Bromiley (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1975) 88–124. See esp. Nicolas Berdyaev, The Beginning and the End (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1952). The ArtScroll Weekday Siddur, ed. Nosson Scherman (New York: Mesorah, 1988) 22–24; Stefan C. Reif, Judaism and Hebrew Prayer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993) 211; Joseph Gutmann, ‘The Sacrifice of Isaac in Medieval Jewish Art,’ Artibus et Historiae 8 (1987) 67–89. Søren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling and The Sickness unto Death, tr. Walter Lowrie (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1968) 33–35. Few Jewish authors have engaged Kierkegaard’s disturbing meditations as incisively as Lev Shestov, Kierkegaard and the Existential Philosophy, tr. Elinor Hewitt (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1969). The question is posed most provocatively by C. G. Montefiore, ‘Nation or Religious Community?’ JQR 12 (1900) 177–94. For recent discussion see Jacob Neusner, ‘The Academic Study of Judaism, the Religion: Progress in Thirty-Five Years?’ JAAR 62 (1994) 1047–68; the term ‘ethnoreligious’ has been applied to American Jewry by J. Alan Winter in two articles: ‘Religious Commitment, Zionism and Integration in a Jewish Community,’ Review of Religious Research 33 (1991) 47–59 and ‘The Transformation of Community Integration among American Jewry: Religion or Ethnoreligion? A National Replication,’ Review of Religious Research 33 (1992) 349–63. See also Michael P. Satlow, Creating Judaism: History, Tradition, Practice (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006). Michael E. Stone, ‘Three Transformations in Judaism: Scripture, History, and Redemption,’ Numen 32 (1985) 218–35. Heinz Westmann and Paul Tillich, Gestaltung der Erlösungsidee in Judentum und im Protestantismus (Ascona: Eranos Stiftung, 1986); Reuven Kimelman, ‘The Daily ‘Amidah and the Rhetoric of Redemption,’ JQR 79 (1988) 165–97.

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Chapter 1

BEGINNINGS

IN THE BEGINNING: The words appear as if from out of the primordial void, answering questions not yet asked. Originally recited rather than written, they shape their listeners’ imaginations as deliberately as the deity crafts nature. The verses unfold to display the divine activity of making, shaping, and creating by performative decree every element and species of nature, each constructive mode indicated with its own term. At the end of the process the deity reflexively commands the making of the first human; creates this being in the same mode in which the earth, the sea-monsters, and the winged creatures were produced; bestows the first blessing on the man and the woman; and then commands them to hold dominion over every living species of nature. Within thirty verses humanity is accounted for and given its charge. The words shape an understanding: that is as certain as the explanatory purpose they serve. No one need wonder what the questions are that are being answered by this account. Questions about cosmogony, the order of nature, and the beginnings of the human condition are invitations to speculation rather than demands upon empirical inquiry. They fall within a separate category of understanding, and a human record of human deeds, even of the heroic variety, will not be adequate for the type of understanding sought. Characterizing this form of narrative as mythical, in whatever sense that term might be used, has some academic utility, but it does not explain the engagement of the original hearers’ or readers’ imaginations.1 The plain fact is that the worldview being shaped by the myth is already actually present before the first words are revealed – in this instance, before the very ‘beginning.’2 It is hard not to notice as well that the creation of the first human contains an enigma, and not simply in the fact that the three modes of divine ‘making’ are involved in his coming into being. The ‘image and likeness’ of God in which the first human is created is traditionally associated with freedom and creative power, the forces at work in the process of creation itself.3 Yet in charging the first pair with commands, that same freedom and creativity have been bound to a divine will and thereby subordinated to it in a way that prescribes the extent of human capacity. Activity and passivity are brought together in the first account of the creation of humans.4 The second creation story complements the first in a juxtaposition that is jarring both textually and conceptually. The philological problems need not

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detain us at this point: it is sufficient to mention only that the deity takes on an additional name, one so sacred that its use in both speech and text is strictly regulated. Far more significant from the anthropological standpoint is the episode in the garden, providing still more answers to a very different set of unasked questions. For instead of a blessing and dominion over nature, the primordial pair of Gen. 3 is barred from the place designed for them and driven into a terrain that is so cursed that it brings only hardship to mortals.5 An epic it is, beyond question, which these books of the Pentateuch comprise: a ‘classic’ by any definition.6 As such it occupies a fixed place in the cultural canon, resisting critical scrutiny into the roles it may have played over time.7 In many ways presuppositions about the sacredness of revelation have formed a hermeneutical ‘fence’ around Torah, a canon of texts bearing a traditional and esoteric meaning distinct from their literal sense.8 It is by now a commonplace of hermeneutical study that the same body of texts will tell one story to the community that claims it as theirs, while conveying a very different impression to those outside that collective.9 A body of texts over a thousand years in the making mirrors as well as narrates the history of a people, each source or episode potentially reflecting a perspective conditioned by the events described; and there is no guarantee that the narrative is an accurate record of those events.10 Simplistic generalizations raise rather than answer questions: The Hebrew Bible is about ‘Israel,’ to be sure, but who constituted that people and how it was identified has been a subject of interminable contention.11 The canon is also about Israel’s relation with God, but there too a univocal definition adequate for every scriptural passage is hopelessly elusive. As a portrayal of the human condition, the biblical corpus is a chronicle of disobedience, fratricide, social disorder, duplicity, immorality, and persecution – all within Genesis alone. Wanderings and desolation, turmoil and division are woven into the history of a nation genuinely convinced of its unique place among human cultures. The painfully realistic depiction of a beleaguered people stands in jarring contrast with the ideals of tranquility and holiness that shape and guide this people through history. Just as the cohesion of the people seems always more vulnerable than secure, the variegated canon seems almost designed to undermine the coherence of the subject it is presumed to narrate. However grandly one might identify them as the unifying themes of the biblical narrative, well-ordered piety and divine sovereignty are more often depicted as ideals impeded by human factors than as realities fully grasped. Rather than being a chronicle of triumphant fulfillment, the scriptural canon offers explanatory principles to help account for a history interwoven with displacement and tragedy. As a cultural epic, the biblical narrative displays an often ironic heroism in its human characters, in large part because its ‘emplotment,’ to use a term brought into currency by Northrop Frye, is the sovereignty of the single biblical deity.12 An epic of divine dominance over history exposes the limitations of heroism among humans. The vicissitudes of the human element in the biblical narrative reinforce rather than

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compromise the divine activity at the core of the history, for without the biblical deity the narration would lack the heroic element to ensure preservation over time. However one might speculate about the explanatory utility of the Hebrew epic in accounting for a predominantly tragic post-biblical trajectory, one can hardly doubt that the history the Bible depicts is fraught with adversity and that this has helped shape the temperament and consciousness of the people.13 PARTICULARITY Conventional modern accounts of primitive religious thought have tended to focus on early humans’ relations with nature.14 While we can hardly doubt that appeasing animistic powers was a critical moment in the separation of nature and culture, we would be amiss in attributing the same homogeneity to culture that we assume nature possesses. In other words, nature is a single organic system, while cultures are highly variegated and in large measure mutually exclusive. Nowhere is this more evident than in the tripartite cosmology of nature – culture – supernature that came to fruition in monotheism, for a unique relationship with a single deity helps determine relations with nature and with other cultures alike. In the narrative imagination of the Second Temple era, the proto-Judaism of ancient Israelite religion attributed the construction of nature and the creation of peoples to the same sovereign deity. Hence the God of Israel was assumed to have ordered that particular people’s relations with all other peoples as surely as the first human’s relation to nature was divinely determined in the creative process. Biblical stories about cities are emblematic of the relation of the people Israel to other branches of humanity. The city is a multivalent symbol in near eastern antiquity, representing not only the social stability that contrasts with nomadic life by surpassing it (ancient legends of cities typically depict their founding as the culmination of periods of wandering) but a measurable degree of physical autonomy and protection from the elements. Mercantile economic life and planned infrastructure combined both to reduce dependence on other peoples and to diminish vulnerability to the forces of nature. The emergence of administrative and legal systems further separated urban cultures from the animistic deities of migratory tribes. In contrast to other ancient legends of founding and building, biblical accounts of cities tend to be moral lessons in fidelity to the divine agent of history. Since it represents civilization, the urban organism exemplifies human society at its best and worst, and it is pertinent to note here that Cain built the first city after being condemned to be a wanderer on the face of the earth (Gen. 4:12, 17). The city, while symbolic for later Judaism of stability and self-sufficiency, is in Cain’s case offered as evidence of his defiance of divine punishment.15 Wanderers of the earth the children of Adam were fated to be, and it has long been recognized that the migratory phase of archaic Israelite history

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shaped the people’s self-understanding.16 In the wake of the Noah story, rightly considered a third creation narrative, the origins of parallel civilizations from the offspring of Japheth, Ham, and Shem include the founding of cities like Resen, Nineveh, and Calah, the three together forming a single great city (ha-ir ha-g’dolah, Gen. 10:11), as well as the city whose inhabitants sought to make a name for themselves, only to be rendered mutually incomprehensible (11:4–9). As a metaphor, the city represents not the pinnacle of culture so much as the supreme embodiment of a people’s assurance of independence and stability.17 Jerusalem, the city that brings to an end the first epoch of the Israelites’ wanderings, might be just another city in the same way that the Hebrew Bible might be just another collection of writings. Within Judaism, however, Jerusalem serves a double role, as both a foil to other cities and a counterpart to the migratory destiny to which Adam’s heirs were initially consigned. The children of Abraham, moreover, were destined to be foreigners in a strange land, and subservient for 400 years (Gen. 15:13), this fate foretold shortly after Abraham had been assured that his descendants would be more numerous than the stars (15:5). This may be one of the more recognizable examples of history being written in the future tense; but it is also an indication that the deity has joined forces with Abraham as a protagonist in the Israelites’ history. The narratives of the wanderings are shaped by cultural and geographical motifs: the wilderness of the nomadic Jews in contrast with the fortified urban dwellings of the pagan ‘nations’ (goyim); the nations themselves as distinct from the chosen ‘people’ (‘am)18; the fluidity of pagan cultures against the durability of Torah. The stability of the nations is depicted as illusory, the nomadic tribes’ faith in God and a future promise as the stronger force than trust in a present human reality. One of the most powerful contrasts is that between the pagan cities and the Jews’ ‘tent’ (’ohel), the antithesis of structure, yet fortified by the presence of the Law.19 Where Torah is, there abides the power of God. The contrast between tents and cities offers another key to the role of piety in the framing or emplotment of this cultural epic. In materially fragile settings such as the Tent of Meeting during the wanderings, the people saw themselves as protected by a deity against whose wrath the fortified cities of the nations had no sure defense. Over and over are these other peoples exposed and weakened; and just as often are the migratory refugees of Israel emboldened in their trust in the divine promise.20 Unlike other ancient epics of wandering and homecoming, the Torah narrative is one in which the vulnerability of the protagonists is accentuated for the sake of reinforcing awareness of the role of God in this people’s destiny. Attempts at a structuralist interpretation, with its obvious contrasts of nomadic and sedentary, rustic and urban, are foiled by a narrative in which the salient distinction is the presence of God and an awareness of that presence among a unified people.21 It so happens that the people can be united in their wanderings and divided within their ostensibly unifying urban

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setting, making the appearance of unity among the ancient Israelites as deceptive as the impression of stability in the fortified pagan cities. If we recognize that the narrative is about God’s active presence, the Hebrew Bible makes clear that the divine presence is no respecter of levels of civilization as measured by social infrastructure. The Hebrew narrative abounds in examples designed to demonstrate the fragility of such apparent confidence in urban selfdetermination. Survival of the people depends not on internal organization and technology, but on faith in a unique promise. Without such trust, effectively rendering the future more compelling than their present surroundings, the acts of Abraham and Moses, serving as types for later Israelite leaders, would have been reckless indeed. REVELATION Torah, a term alternately univocal and multivalent, resists facile generalizations at the same time that it demands an unambiguous definition. Unique in the minds of the people whom it binds together, its revelatory power depends on engaged interpretation by all who adhere to it. Revelation of Torah is not a one-directional transmission from a divine Revealer to a passive recipient, but the progressive and active constructing of meaning for the divine–human relationship.22 That much is evident. Implicit is the continuous operation of Torah in an oral tradition in which revelation and application coalesce while the human and divine elements remain formally (if not functionally) distinct. The second creation story is the first appearance of the Divine Name as well as the first instance of geographical specificity, indicated by locating Eden in the ‘east’ and identifying the waters that ensure its fertility (Gen. 2:8, 10–14). Hence it is a reference-point for historical progression, complementary rather than contradictory to the ordering of nature in the first story. It is also the first instance of prohibition and the threat of death for disobedience (2:17). The man comes under the weight of divine punishment just as God recognizes that the man is incomplete without a mate (2:18): early evidence of a theme of progression that binds human and god in a single continuous activity. The privileged place among cultures that the Jewish people felt they occupied is experienced both historically and conceptually. Just as proper order is realized in the convergence of temporal and spatial planes, so is the Hebraic consciousness complete only when the people recognize not only divine sovereignty over events but see it as a benevolent force continuously exercised on their behalf. The knowledge of God as an agent of order, therefore, includes a sense of divine beneficence, a quality exemplified in the redemption from bondage in Egypt. In the continuing self-revelation of the Hebrew deity, the dialogues between God and Moses in Ex. 3–13 are a profound disclosure of the divine nature and of God’s work in history. God not only gives Moses the eloquence (and

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the very words) to address Pharaoh on behalf of the people, but guarantees the success of his efforts. Moses learns what God will do with Pharaoh, and armed with this knowledge he gains the strength of that privileged knowledge of history that sets the Jewish people apart from other nations throughout history. God’s verbal revelation through Moses to Israel of being ’ehyeh ’asher ’ehyeh (Ex. 3:14) indicates permanence over time; the action that follows reveals God’s solidarity with Israel within the course of human events. The secret knowledge is itself a source of strength in the escape from captivity, and the nearly contemporary Song of Moses (Ex. 15:1–18) recognizes Israel’s liberation as God’s work.23 An awareness of active divine sovereignty, coupled with a covenantal understanding of the divine–human relationship, demands an interpretive stance in which both good fortune and misfortune are seen as divine responses to Israel’s observance of the terms of the covenant. The dynamic element of the divine–human relationship sets both God and Israel into an ineluctable reciprocal bond: whatever good befalls Israel is to be seen as the result of divine blessing, and whatever ill occurs is to be regarded as the product of divine disfavor. The sequence of beginnings that constitutes the Patriarchal epic acquires legendary status with the new beginning represented by the return of the exiles from the Babylonian interregnum.24 The biblical deity’s influence upon Cyrus, as we are told at the beginning of Ezra (1:1-4), led that Persian monarch to rebuild the Temple and aid the return of a reported 42,360 Israelites to Judah (2:64). The resettled population assembled as one in the city (3:1), completing in physical terms the unification symbolically begun in Abraham’s household before the migration to Egypt. That the settlement has meaning only in relation to dislocation is signaled in various ways, among them by references to the Israelites as children of the exile (b’nei ha-gulah, 4:1, 6:16, 19). In allusions to the textuality of Torah (e.g., Ez. 8:5, Neh. 10:35) – another material consolidation – the Ezra–Nehemiah account makes explicit a transition from the orality of a nomadic people to the literacy of a sedentary culture. The post-Pentateuchal scriptural narrative records a program of conquest emplotted by two prominent features: the support of the biblical god with strength and guidance, and the brute force of the indigenous peoples.25 Each aspect is anticipated in the primitive narrative and confirmed in the belief that adherence to the Covenant will ensure dominance over nations that are stronger in every respect except divine partnership. Hence regions that had not belonged to the Israelites became theirs, narratively, by means of divine power and their god’s faithfulness in fulfilling a promise made generations before (Josh. 23:14; 1 Sam. 12:22). The conditional character of this divine aid is indicated in various ways, notably in the use of idolatry as the explanatory principle for defeat or adversity.26 The generation that followed Joshua, for example, began to worship other deities and subsequently (or consequently, by the mythic explanation) became weak and vulnerable to surrounding predators (Josh. 7:11-

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13; Judges 2:11-15, 20-22, 3:7-8, 4:2, 6:1, 13:5). That they were in turn released from their suffering, sometimes forcefully, by the same deity is integral to the narrative (Judges 2:18, 3:9, 3:15, 4:15, 1 Sam. 9:16); and their protracted adversity despite pleas for release is likewise attributed to the lord’s will (1 Sam. 6:7-10), suggesting a standard of devotion concealed from the people. When the post-Pentateuchal books are read as a narrative in three dimensions, divine agency being the recondite but salient factor for Jewish particularity, the Early Prophets provide explanation and exhortation, depending of course on one’s location and temporal perspective. Being part of the Prophetic corpus of Tanakh, these texts are intended to reinforce an outlook already formed, just as the prophets whose activities they record sought to inculcate obedience to the law given to Moses. The reciprocal organization of ancient Israelite history needs no elaboration. Worth mentioning, however, is the fact that these works find their greatest explanatory and hortatory utility at moments of vulnerability and contingency: upon return from exile, amid occupation by alien empires, under persecution. At such points the piety disclosed in the narrative gives meaning to adversity and definition to the people. COVENANT In the beginning was the covenant. Not dramatically, to be sure, but hermeneutically: the relationship of Israel with the biblical deity is the presupposition of biblical narrative. The sequence of books reveals a succession of refinements of scope, from cosmic origins to cultural uniqueness, fully understood only from the perspective of a group sure of its identity as a people singled out for a unique purpose. The Second Temple period, when a large part of the canon took durable form, offered a vantage point from which to view both earthly history and divine agency.27 Jewish history has a succession of beginnings, as if to thwart attempts to narrow Judaism down to a single originating moment. Adam and Noah, Abraham and Moses represent points of increasing clarity in the divine–human relationship, phases in the progression of understanding. Knowledge of the biblical deity and the self-knowledge of the people culminate in the revelation on Sinai, the statement of the terms in the contract between God and Israel. And that revelation is carried forward with the textualization of Torah and the systematizing of sacrificial practice during the Second Temple Period. Philologists have identified cognates to the Hebrew word b’rit that connote legal and commercial transactions.28 Hence there is nothing demeaning in referring to the biblical covenant as a contractual agreement; doing so may in fact illumine some of its original meaning. As a diplomatic alliance, a covenant ensured protection so long as specific conditions were maintained.

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By constructing such an arrangement in the divine realm, making God a party to a covenant with Israel, the biblical authors translated worldly protective treatises into supernatural terms. By its nature the covenant is an exclusive agreement, as precise in defining the parties privy to it as in specifying the terms by which it is to be kept. The unity attributed to God corresponds to the idealized coherence of the covenantal people.29 Solidarity in the ideal realm contrasts with instability in the spatial plane, as the tenuousness of a fixed abode dogged the people from Eden to Zion. As we see in the second creation story, geography is an essential dimension of the ancient Hebrew imagination, and no understanding of early Judaism is possible without an appreciation of the spatial contexts depicted in the biblical texts. From the exile from the Garden to the banks of the Jordan in Moab, from the First Temple to the rivers of Babylon, the setting of place is more than dramatic convention: it is part of the thematic structure of the religious narrative. The divine ordering of the world, poetically evoked in Gen. 1:1-2:4, is continued in the threefold division of the sons of Noah and the seventy nations originating with them (Gen. 10); the promise of Canaan to the descendants of Abraham (Gen. 12:7); and the entry into the land under the leadership of Joshua (Josh. 1:23), symbolically unifying the twelve tribes in the realization of the promise made to their forefather. Consciousness of time is an equally important component of the early Jewish understanding of human experience. From the promise of blessing upon Abraham’s descendants (Gen. 12:1-3) to the restoration to Zion under Cyrus (2 Chron. 36:23), the future is as real as the past, faith in the covenantal promise being as certain as historical fact. Space and time are conjoined in the Jewish imagination and symbolized in the word ‘olam, usually rendered ‘forever and ever’ or ‘world’ but later signifying both temporal and spatial extension.30 Divine sovereignty governs both dimensions; the limits of language and of human understanding divide this unity into differently measured planes of experience. The divine work of ordering thus takes place in space and time; if past and future are elusive abstractions in their intangibility, geography is all too concrete as a shaper of the ancient Jewish experience. The work of creation, as has often been noted, is a process of division and separation in which God sets all things in their proper places. Less frequently mentioned but just as important is the location of the human family, for it is at this point in the narrative that normative and deviant states acquire definition. With a view to both past and future, ancient Jewish piety saw the totality of history as the unfolding of divine intentions for Israel. Awareness of a promise to Abraham to be fulfilled through his progeny was set deeply within the ancient Jewish consciousness; and this promise was reclaimed by successive patriarchs in later stages of the people’s history. The veracity of the biblical god’s promises was documented in the course of history, so that the past provided an assurance for the future. At no other point in ancient

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Mediterranean culture has this temporal juxtaposition of past and future been cast as an epistemological baseline. The weight of the interpretive burden upon ancient Israelite interpreters of history can hardly be overstated. Attributing one course of events to the will of a benevolent deity was one thing; ascribing adverse circumstances to the same divine will called for an awareness of retributive powers possibly new to the primitive religious imagination. Commercial and legal idiom seems to have provided the concept, as well as the term, b’rit or covenant.31 The mutually conditional character of the financial or diplomatic contract served on the one hand to explain adversity without abandoning the notion of a benevolent deity; on the other it held the believing people to demands that could not be ignored without consequences. The history of ancient Israel is religiously meaningless to Judaism without the covenantal bond. Essential to precisely understanding the divine–human covenant is an awareness of extension over time. God’s promise to Noah of protection over all living things (Gen. 8:21-22; 9:11-13, 15-16) foreshadows the particular promise made to Abraham that his seed will be bound by an everlasting covenant (Gen. 17:8-16; livrit ‘olam Gen. 17:7, 13, 19). With this promise the future took on a reality for Abraham that shaped all his later actions. The biblical deity is depicted as knowing the future faithfulness of Abraham’s descendants (Gen. 18:17-18); and Abraham himself trusted sufficiently in the promise to jeopardize, for the sake of obedience to the divine command, his one obvious link to the great nation that would spring from his seed (Gen. 22:9-13, 17-18). Shaped by so strong a myth of divine promises kept on condition of obedience, the ancient Jewish imagination reified the invisible to a rare degree. Projecting the commercial concept of covenant onto the relationship between Israel and the biblical God underscored a relationship that was at once reciprocal (as were all such contracts) and uniquely privileged, given the transcendent sovereignty of Israel’s divine counterparty. While structurally similar to other ancient economic and political alliances, the disparity between a landless nomadic people and the creator of the world meant that the fulfillment of the promise would eventually require divine intervention in the course of human affairs. Once again we see that the faith and practice of ancient Israel were predicated on the assurance of God’s dominance over history.32 A reciprocal piety in which divine protection is conditional on observance of highly detailed covenantal demands will understandably be associated with a rigorous code of purity and ritual. For one thing, the distinctive promise provides a compelling incentive to a form of obedience unique in its comprehensiveness and difficulty. Second, the rigors of the covenant, being impossible to fulfill under any but ideal conditions, allow for an explanation of the adversity that befalls the Jewish people throughout the history of the covenant. As a condition for divine favor, the holiness code occupied a space in the Jewish religious imagination between attainability and impossibility.

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The historical record preserved in the Hebrew canon is a chronicle of imperfect fulfillment, and often outright defiance, of the divine demands. Success in realizing the divine promise depends on undeviating adherence to Torah (Josh. 1:7-8), but the divine demand is ignored as readily in Canaan as it had been in Eden (Josh. 7:10-15). Swift retribution follows disobedience, especially worship of other deities.33 From the punitive action of God it is evident that the mutual honoring of 1 Sam. 2:30 is reinforced by immediate intervention.34 Tension between divine benevolence and justified punishment is maintained within a continuum in which the former predominates conceptually, even if not in the experience of the people. Trust in the eventual realization of divine benevolence is anchored in a historical perspective which regards the promise as already having been partly fulfilled. The spawning of a great nation from Abraham’s seed and the redemption from bondage under Pharaoh are taken as indications of a providential design already begun within history yet understood only by the heirs of the covenant, the people Israel. The opening words of the Decalogue, echoed in divine pronouncements throughout the scriptural canon, indicate not only a redemptive event in the past but the completion of the providential plan, contingent of course on the faithfulness of its beneficiaries. Trust in the triumph of the divine plan over all human ones, and of the uniqueness of Jewish history and historical vision, finds expression in a number of forms, of which the Psalms are surely the most spectacular. In rich imagery Israel’s place in history is evoked in a continual counterpoise of future deliverance from present desolation. Traditionally attributed to the historical David (reigned c. 1010–970 BCE), and thereby crediting him with inspired knowledge of future events, much of the Psalmic corpus is now generally thought to have been composed during or after the first Exile (587–36 BCE).35 Whatever the philological and historical merits of setting the Psalms within the sixth-century context, the traditional attribution implies that the royal Psalmist of the tenth century BCE had knowledge not only of exile but of a foreordained restoration. The long view from a distant past provides a pious contextualization in which a return to Jerusalem-based ritual life is an assured certainty rather than a hoped-for possibility. The historical redemption from Egypt in the thirteenth century BCE validates expectations of imminent restoration; divine will and power ensure the conditions for observance of Torah.36 The Hebraic historical perspective, in combining a theocentric understanding of past events with an equally certain assurance of redemption, stands out among ancient Mediterranean conceptions of history. The epistemological privilege by which the Jews saw their god at work in their remote history provided a unique insight into the future. Present adversity served as an opportunity to glorify the deity who favors Israel over all peoples, a projection of Abraham’s agreement to sacrifice Isaac in his knowledge that future promise is more real than present risk and pain. Hence the subordi-

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23

nation of suffering to triumph is grounded in a historically tested faith in divine goodness and power. Although the periods of wandering and exile are not idealized, they are certainly canonized in synagogue liturgy. The centrality of the Psalms in weekday and Sabbath worship points to a longing for restoration, necessarily predicated on belief in an inevitable cyclical recapitulation of redemptive history. In noticeable ways the transition from migratory to sedentary culture is enshrined in seasonal rituals such as Sukkot and Shavuot, pilgrimage festivals that had a nostalgic meaning during the Second Temple period and offered hope for the future during the long exile that followed. Sukkot in particular is a festival that reverses the sequence of history, collapsing the generations of the Patriarchs with the post-Exodus wanderings. Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Moses, Aaron, Joseph, and David (note the number) are summoned in the ushpizin ritual to dwell in the sukkah with the flesh-andblood participants, all enveloped in a divine presence that negates the vulnerability of life in tents.37 Nominally a memorial of the Exodus, sukkot locates the interim between Egypt and Canaan as the time of gladness (simcha) in which the joy of expectation presumably exceeds the gratitude of those expectations being realized. The consolatory power of this festival during the long dispersion, when the tents of the wilderness are replaced by dwellings far from home, is obvious. And the biblical book read on this holiday, Ecclesiastes, serves as a bittersweet commentary on dislocation.

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24

Notes 1 2

3

4 5 6 7 8

9 10 11 12

13 14 15

Michael Fishbane, The Exegetical Imagination: On Jewish Thought and Theology (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998) 86–89. Ernst Cassirer, The Problem of Knowledge: Philosophy, Science, and History since Hegel, tr. Wm. H. Woglom and Charles W. Hendel (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1950) 297–300. Arvid S. Kapelrud argues that the first creation story is Exilic in origin, i.e. dates from the sixth century BCE: ‘The Mythological Features in Genesis Chapter 1 and the Author’s Intentions,’ VT 24 (1974) 178–86, esp. 180. In the tendentious yet provocative words of Robert E. Morrison (Primitive Existentialism: A Commentary on Genesis: Chapters 1 through 4 [New York: Philosophical Library, 1967] 47): ‘Now, if the Image is Pure Consciousness, and Man is Pure Image, then Man as Image is Pure Consciousness. Moreover, Pure Consciousness, the most extreme concentration of Presence, is God as Existence. It follows that Man, the genus, is God as Existence.’ The human condition in the first creation episode is acutely elucidated by Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg, The Beginning of Desire: Reflections on Genesis (New York: Doubleday, 1995) 10–17. The Rabbinic authorities differ on the severity or leniency of the expulsion: see MR 1.177–78; but also AS Gen. vol. 1a, 138–40. Rashi at Gen. 3:24 (vol. 1, 17) takes the twisting flaming sword to indicate that the garden was never again to be entered. On nuances between ‘classic’ and revelation, see Krister Stendahl, ‘The Bible as a Classic and the Bible as Holy Scripture,’ JBL 103 (1984) 3–10, esp. 4–5. One of the most lucid recent discussions is Philip R. Davies, ‘Judaism and the Hebrew Scriptures,’ BCJ 37–57. Moshe Halbertal, People of the Book: Canon, Meaning, and Authority (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997)11–44; for development of the method in the Rabbinical period see G[eza] Vermes, ‘Bible and Midrash: Early Old Testament Exegesis,’ CHB 1.199–231; David Weiss Halivni, Peshat and Derash: Plain and Applied Meaning in Rabbinic Exegesis (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991); Michael Fishbane, The Garments of Torah: Essays in Biblical Hermeneutics (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992) 3–46. See Paul Ricoeur, ‘Existence and Hermeneutics,’ in The Conflict of Interpretations: Essays in Hermeneutics (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2007) 3–24. Richard H. Moye, ‘In the Beginning: Myth and History in Genesis and Exodus,’ JBL 109 (1990) 577–98. Jacob Neusner, ‘The Doctrine of Israel,’ in BCJ 230–46 offers a view of ways in which the community is defined within the tradition. Northrop Frye, The Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957), and, as a heuristic device for historiography, Hayden White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973) 7–11. As a hermeneutical concept emplotment is most usefully elucidated in Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, tr. Kathleen McLaughlin and David Pellauer, vol. 1 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984) 31–51. A provocative exegesis structured around the categories of order and chaos in Genesis (and beyond) is Jon D. Levenson, Creation and the Persistence of Evil: The Jewish Drama of Divine Omnipotence (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988). Emile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, tr. J. W. Swain (New York: Free Press, 1965) 89–97; Ernst Cassirer, Language and Myth, tr. S. K. Langer (New York: Dover, 1953) 62–76. Cain, who becomes a tiller of the ground like his father (and poignantly is called an hmd) db( at Gen. 4:2), receives no favor from God for his agricultural offerings (4:5), suggesting that farming itself is a defiance of the rootlessness to which Adam’s

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16 17 18 19 20 21 22

23 24 25 26 27 28

29 30

31 32 33 34

25

progeny was consigned; cf. MR 1.193, n. 5 (‘these cities shall remain an everlasting memorial to their shame’); Rashi 1, 19. Distrust of urban civilization is echoed in the defenses of Bedouin life found in medieval Islam: see for example Ibn Khaldûn, The Muqaddimah, tr. Franz Rosenthal (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005) 91–98, 107–11 See for example John W. Flight, ‘The Nomadic Idea and Ideal in the Old Testament,’ JBL 42 (1923) 158–226. The fate of this city, Babel, whose inhabitants were scattered in punishment for their presumption in trying to protect themselves from being scattered, is an obvious case in point (see Rashi on Gen. 11:4–9, vol. 1, 45). On the meanings of these terms see Aelred Cody, ‘When Is the Chosen People Called a Gôy?’ VT 14 (1964), 1–6; also TWAT 1.965–73; 6.177–94. The Tent of Meeting (d(wm lh)) is sacred space despite its lack of geographical specificity (Ex. 29:10, 30:17–18, 20, 26); for contrast between tent and Temple see Jon D. Levenson, ‘The Jerusalem Temple in Devotional and Visual Experience,’ JS 1, 32–61. See Won W. Lee, Punishment and Forgiveness in Israel’s Migratory Campaign (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans, 2003) 283–90. For a synopsis and critique of Lévi-Strauss’s influence on the interpretation of primitive folklore, see G. S. Kirk, Myth: Its Meaning and Function in Ancient and Other Cultures (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1970) 42–83. Brief and incisive on this point is Jacob Neusner’s entry ‘Bible Interpretation: How Judaism Reads the Bible,’ EJ2 1.193–210; from a different perspective, see Robert Alter, The Art of Biblical Narrative (New York: Basic Books, 1981) 155–77; Beth Sharon Ash, ‘Jewish Hermeneutics and Contemporary Theories of Textuality: Hartman, Bloom, and Derrida,’ Modern Philology 85 (1987) 65–80; Michael LaFargue, ‘Are Texts Determinate? Derrida, Barth, and the Role of the Biblical Scholar,’ HTR 81 (1988) 341–57. On the antiquity of this text see Angel Sáenz-Badillos, A History of the Hebrew Language, tr. John Elwolde (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993) 56–57. For the post-exilic mentality see David Weiss Halivni, Revelation Restored: Divine Writ and Critical Responses (London: SCM Press, 2001) 12–22. Josh. 1:7-9, 13; 8:18-23; 10:12-15; 11:10-13; 23:5, 9-10; Judges 11:21-23, 32-33; 1 Sam. 13:5, 14:31. Cf. the phrase ‘swerving right or left’ at Josh. 1:7, 23:6, 23:15-16, 24:14-15. Edward L. Greenstein, ‘The Formation of the Biblical Narrative Corpus,’ AJSR 15 (1990) 151–78. The word seems to have been borrowed from other languages: see E. A. Wallis Budge, An Egyptian Hieroglyphic Dictionary (London: John Murray, 1920) 204b, and J. Alberto Soggin, ‘Akkadisch Tar Berîti und Hebraïsch tyrb trk,’ VT 18 (1968) 210–15; for its biblical connotations see H. W. Wolff, ‘Jahwe als Bundesvermittler,’ VT 6 (1956) 316–20; also TWAT 1.781–808 and EJ2 1.531–46. J. Gerald Janzen, ‘On the Most Important Word in the Shema (Deuteronomy VI 4–5),’ VT 37 (1987) 280–300. Derived from Ml( (to conceal) the noun form is usually rendered in temporal terms, such as ai0w&n in the Septuagint and aeternum in the Vulgate. See H. Wheeler Robinson, Inspiration and Revelation in the Old Testament (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1953) 113–16; also TWAT 6.160–67. Ex. 34:10–16; cf. Jer. 31:31–34. Rolf Rendtorff, ‘“Covenant” as a Structuring Concept in Genesis and Exodus,’ JBL 108 (1989) 385–93. Judges 6:1, 10; 13:1; 1 Sam 24:1; 2 Kgs. 21:2, 12-15; 23:26-27; Jer. 44:7-14. The original prohibition is found at Ex. 20:3 and 22:19; cf. Jer. 25:6. Note that dwbk has connotations of glory as well as honor; hence the people who glorify God will in turn bear a unique glory (Lexicon in Veteris Testamenti Libros, ed. Ludwig Koehler and Walter Baumgartner [Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1958] 421).

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35 Raymond Jacques Tournay, Seeing and Hearing God with the Psalms: The Prophetic Liturgy of the Second Temple in Jerusalem, tr. J. Edward Crowley, JSOT Suppl. Series, 118 (Sheffield: JSOT, 1991). 36 See, e.g., John Van Seters, ‘Confessional Reformulation in the Exilic Period,’ VT 22 (1972) 448–59. 37 The Complete ArtScroll Machzor: Succos [nusach. Ashkenaz], ed. Avie Gold (New York: Mesorah Publications, 1999) 74–75.

Chapter 2

FORGED IN EXILE

WANDERINGS A succession of beginnings, a sequence of moments of progress disrupted and new starts: the narrative of Tanakh is of a type apart from other ancient epics of cultural history. Not only is the divine agent arguably more active in the shaping of the people’s destiny than other deities were in the building of contemporaneous civilizations, but the history recounted runs counter to typical expectations of omnipotent aid. Unlike many other cultural epics, the Tanakh does not easily reveal a pattern of history; it seems to be a sequence of contingent events more than a linear trajectory toward a single end. The principle governing the sequence of events is not an historical law or presumptive destiny, but rather a dialectical relationship between a free people and an omnipotent deity. Covenantal conditions would have little force if the believed-in benefits and consequences were not realized in the material world. As indicated in the Introduction, the Jewish tradition was especially adept, among the Mediterranean religions, at accounting for adversity, a skill that proved necessary over and over. Waves of persecution, political and religious, beset the scattered communities. And although consensus would be too strong a word, since it suggests more communication than was possible, a predominant response is discernible among the writings that survive from the medieval communities. Invoking the example of Job, Jewish authors tended to see worldly adversity as a challenge to be met by an affirmation of divine benevolence, however contrary one’s own experience may be.1 And, as with the biblical Job, the harsher the adversity, the greater the presumed final reward. In more ways than one, the Jewish response confounded their adversaries. This is not to say that the harshness was not acutely felt: there is no denying that stigma, however proudly it may have been borne, was painful indeed. But for a people held together by a narrative centered round redemption from bondage, the bitterness of life in alien lands had a religious value scarcely comprehended by the oppressors.2 The hardening of Pharaoh’s heart (Ex. 10:1-2) served as a paradigm by which to interpret each new wave of persecution as a harbinger of a redemptive divine intervention in

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history. Instead of discouraging the communities, the fact that each new episode seemed more severe than its predecessors raised hopes still higher that a new exodus was imminent. Adversity, however harsh at the time, was therefore the necessary counterpart to the expected redemption, and that was a very good thing indeed. Hope of a fulfilled promise not only allowed the scattered communities to endure tribulation, but offered a sense of difference from those around them, symbolized by the image of being chosen. The Exodus narrative kept the purpose of freedom very close to the hope of liberation: emancipation was the precursor to fulfilling the divine intention that the Jews manifest holiness in a unique degree. A sense of being chosen is only half the picture, useless without the question ‘Chosen for what?’ directly addressed. Here is where divisions emerged, since answers to this vital question ranged from suffering itself being a form of sanctity to the mystics’ belief that the divine attributes are concealed within contradictory appearances and discoverable through esoteric teaching. Whatever the purpose of God’s selection of the people Israel, belief in a distinct identity grounded in a special relationship with God set the Jews apart from the ‘nations.’3 Perplexing as it may be to academic interpreters enamored with precise categories of ‘religious’ and ‘secular,’ the fact of the matter is that Jewish cultural particularity was inextricably woven with piety. Isolation from other communities, when added upon separation from the historical homeland, created an uneasy combination of bewilderment and competitiveness in some communities. Observance through pious study, preservation of the purity laws, kindness to others: all were options for each assemblage of Jews, either arrived at by consensus, preserved through conformity to custom, or handed down by the religious leader, the rabbi. When it came to following inherited practice, honoring one’s forebears was a mandate so inclusive as to present conflicting obligations: did earlier ancestors have more authority than more recent ones? Then the earliest precedents overrode later ones. Or were later generations closer to the coming redemption than to the last dispersion? With such an expectation would come a more intense urgency. Essential questions, these and others like them, but the answers were elusive. Explicit as Torah is in specific prescriptions for life centered in the Temple, a deafening silence characterizes any anticipation that the people might need guidance in the intervals between Temple epochs. The silence can be explained, since Torah provides the terms for preserving the covenantal bond and Diaspora is a suspension of the necessary conditions for such fulfillment. But if we consider that the divine author of Torah must have foreseen literally millennia of absence from the land in which the Law could be realized in practice, we are led to the possibility that the void of divine guidance is an integral component of exilic existence. As is well known, revelation on Sinai came in two forms, and the tradition has viewed them as complementary.4 Oral Torah, in its strictest terms referring

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to the 613 laws not codified in the five Books of Mosaic Law but preserved in Mishnah, was understood more inclusively as unwritten normative tradition generally, or the body of guidance handed down from ancient rabbis onward. This tradition remained unwritten for a variety of reasons, chief among them being the importance of maintaining a degree of elasticity in view of the changing circumstances each segment of the people encountered. In many cases the rabbi and the learned men in his circle became virtual embodiments of Oral Torah, providing charismatic guidance for otherwise unorganized groups. FROM HISTORY TO MEMORY The covenantal structure of Jewish identity was completed during the Second Temple period, an era rightly regarded as the beginnings of the Jewish religion.5 By 500 BCE the history of the people had already seen the Abrahamic promise fulfilled, overturned, and restored. Divine sovereignty and the dual human will had been tested, vindicated, and now stood as counterparts in a dialectical tension, the character of which would determine the future reward or punishment of the people. The importance of this sequence of events in the development of piety cannot be overstated, yet discerning the working of historical narrative in shaping the Jewish imagination in the Second Temple period has not been easy.6 In part this lack of attention to the distinctively religious reading of the biblical canon is attributable to the rigorously non-confessional posture of archaeologists and philologists, whose investigations have done much to elucidate the historical record, but not much else, of the ancient texts. Less readily acknowledged is the equally obvious point that according to the covenantal hermeneutic, the Judaic divine–human relationship antedates the Second Temple – and the First, and Sinai – and originates instead in the Patriarchal era.7 Moreover, as we saw in the last chapter, the faculty of interpreting divine law is itself transmitted along with the written Torah, so that the hermeneutical enterprise is contained within revelation itself.8 On the surface of things it must seem that the dilemma of ‘insider’ and ‘outsider’ interpretations is nowhere more intractable than in approaches to the Jewish canon. In the earlier history of religious studies, to be sure, the gulf separating positivistic from pious approaches to the scriptural text was wide and unbridgeable. During recent decades, however, the maturing of hermeneutical theory has enabled historians of religious thought to begin discerning the irreducibly religious nature of texts without capitulating to those texts’ worldviews.9 Somewhat later in origin and developing in parallel with the rise of hermeneutical theory has been research into the role of collective memory in cultures.10 Memory best serves as subject-matter for inquiry when it is still relatively fresh and when cultural patterns are taking shape: thus it is not surprising that memory has been thematized most carefully by sociologists and

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by historians of modernity.11 The role of memory as a shaper of religious identity over the broad sweep of time has yet to be fully explored with reference to Judaism.12 The span of a millennium between the Patriarchal era and the Second Temple period can easily be described as the early history of the people Israel and the prehistory of the religion Judaism.13 Nothing could be simpler – or more misleading, since what we differentiate as culture and piety were at the time considered one and the same. Abraham is credited with knowing the Law a half-millennium before Sinai, and the prophets of the First Temple period are depicted as being fully aware of the penalties for disobedience of the Law. Continuity with the primitive beginnings of rootlessness, vulnerability and servitude is so unshakably assumed that we can legitimately wonder whether the Second Temple period actually marks a new beginning. Obviously the redaction and canonization of the written Torah represents a transition from orality to literacy, a shift of monumental importance.14 Just as noteworthy, however, is the nostalgia for the beginnings of Israelite history demonstrated in post-biblical Judaism: Egypt, wanderings, and the First Temple are intentionally claimed as the originative moments of the people’s history. Memory, in sum, is both received and created; whether this proportion changes when the meaning has a mysterious character is not for us to say. When that memory is the source of bonding for a given people, the purpose in preserving the memory is bound to the intention to ensure the cohesion and continuity of the people. Within recent decades it has become clear that the hermeneutics of a religious tradition may differ from the rules of interpretation that govern other cultural traditions. The transmission of memory, for one thing, is more tolerant of the mythical than is possible in a culture shaped by historical skepticism.15 IN EXILE Judaism is not singularly unique among the world’s peoples, but it adheres to a vision of history in which Jews have a special relationship with God and a distinctive role in humanity. A legacy originating in Abraham and Sarah (Gen. 17) made Jews the beneficiaries of a divine promise – on condition of faithfulness – that set them apart from the ‘nations,’ who were nevertheless bound by the covenant God made with Noah (Gen. 9:8-17). It was felt that this promise was fulfilled and renewed in the building of First and Second Temples, and that it would be fulfilled yet again in the future. The nations would continue to do what nations do, rise and fall, but the people Israel would remain true to what they were chosen to do, which was to preserve the revealed Torah. This obligation, seen as a blessing rather than a task, gave a unifying purpose to the scattered communities of the Diaspora. Although not an organized religion in the usual sense of the term, Judaism was nevertheless efficiently preserved by a common intention.

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Alienation is experienced in two dimensions by the Jewish people in antiquity, spatial and devotional, and the convergence of right piety with its proper place is an elusive ideal. Israel is short of wholeness and rest (shalom) when wandering, or at variance with the demands of the deity, or both. There is an ironic benefit in the absence of shalom. Geographical displacement is a condition in which Israel has only its trust in divine protection and promise on which to rely, and this stimulates more hopeful piety than settlement and fulfillment of the promise. As the legacy of the Early Prophets seems to indicate, the latter seems to promote faithlessness and disobedience rather than grateful observance. Levels of piety, in other words, seem to be determined by the presence of conditions for Torah observance – but inversely. The farther from the normative conditions the people are, the more intent their devotion. Such a simple formula schematizes Jewish existence to an almost impossible level of precision, eliminating the ambiguity that challenges exegetes and thinkers within that tradition to give order to the scattered ideas. Some degree of ambiguity being necessary as a hedge around Torah, the continuous process of interpreting revelation may be described as a journey through alien terrain toward a promised experience of rest and wholeness, namely a clear and coherent understanding of scriptural revelation. Like other ancient epics, the Torah narrative is a story of migration and homecoming, and like them serves to educate successive generations about their cultural identity. It is doubly didactic, overtly communicating the laws and customs that set the people apart from all others, while also reinforcing a sense of dependency upon the deity who has issued those laws. And just as with the undifferentiated unity of space and time (‘olam), here too the apparent division of human and divine realms of activity is more a product of the limits of human understanding than a separation within divine activity itself. The line between God’s work and that of persons is at times tantalizingly indistinct. Without their belief in an overarching divine benevolence, the Jewish inhabitants of Hellenistic Alexandria or of Judea under Roman domination would have had little reason to resist assimilation. Capitulating to being absorbed by neighboring or occupying cultures, while transparently expedient for the political survival of the people, was to be rejected as another form of the idolatrous alliances that had precipitated divine wrath in the past.16 Hellenism was an environment both alien and familiar, especially among Egyptian Jews, who found in Alexandria an urban amalgam of indigenous Egyptians, Greeks, and Jews in relative equipoise. With a single language and economy, the distinct segments of the populace came close to creating a common public space. Unlike their Egyptian sojourn of a millennium before, Jews in Alexandria enjoyed civil privileges under rulers who almost to a man were patrons of learning. Save for the geographical separation, the Hellenistic Mediterranean offered Jews outside of Palestine advantages hitherto unimaginable. Therein lay a complex of problems, which will echo through the Diaspora. The integration of an exclusive people into an inclusive society is not a

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bidirectional process in which part and whole undergo equivalent degrees of adaptation. Jewish resistance to absorption within the Greek-speaking larger society was grounded in the structural impossibility of being Jewish without the literal terms and promises of the hereditary covenant. The Greeks had themselves been xenophobic during their Golden Age, so the Ptolemaic social engineering was in some ways a distortion of the Hellenic culture that presumably was being preserved. But the Jewish situation was well-nigh intractable. The outstanding exception to Jewish suspicion of Greek culture is Philo of Alexandria, often referred to somewhat misleadingly as Philo Judaeus. The Latin cognomen is problematic not because he was not Jewish; that he certainly was. But his thought is a synthesis of Greek and Jewish strands, and this displayed a penchant for allegorizing the Torah narrative that left many suspicious that he saw the material details of the canon as primarily symbolic rather than literal. Philo’s influence on exegesis is found in Christian Alexandrian theologians: Origen, for example.17 His readings were always considered somewhat aberrant by his fellow Jews.18 Philo’s allegorical tendency reveals a fertile speculative imagination, an impulse to construct an alternate realm and one yielding more authentic value for the individual. The reader of the scriptural text is not, after all, a principal in the biblical story yet is bound in piety to find some point of identification with the characters. As might be expected, Philo’s allegorical method allows him to apply the narrative to personal experience to an extent recognizably radical among his contemporaries. The episode of the expulsion from Eden, to take the most prominent example, is for Philo symbolic of general estrangement from God and of the restlessness of the human condition. The garden represents God’s planting of virtues in the human soul, the tree of life being goodness in general.19 The first person, says Philo, lived in harmony with the natural world, a ‘city’ in the spiritual sense but not one constructed by persons.20 In a treatise on Cain, Philo contrasts Adam’s forced departure from Eden with Cain’s voluntary exile, making the point that Cain’s free act garners irremediable consequences.21 In his exercise of freedom Cain displayed the foolishness and restlessness of those who do not know the ‘Existent One’ (Philo’s Platonization of the divine name); hence alienation will be their inevitable lot. Cain’s wife, in Philo’s allegorical interpretation, is the product of his own self-loving mind: ‘“Wife” is, I think, the name he gives to the opinion held by an impious man’s reasoning faculty, the opinion which the impious man (habitually) assumes touching (all) matters.’22 The point of Philo’s exposition need not be belabored: humanity wanders aimlessly in an exile of its own making when it trusts in human rather than divine power. The threat of alien peoples to the unity and stability of Israel went from bad to worse with the creation and militarization of the Roman Empire and its control of the eastern Mediterranean. The people being now in a state of captivity on their own soil, Jewish attitudes to their Law began to change in

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complex ways, for the cultural autonomy necessary for the covenant had been suspended, and an unprecedented proliferation of sects demonstrated that there was no single remedy about which all could agree. While the divisions within the people Israel were regarded by many as the occasion for the punitive work carried out by the Romans (this might be an instance of transposing cause and effect), the prolonged domination by an alien people intensified sectarian tendencies, with certain rabbinical schools taking on various combinations of legalistic, moralistic, and of course apocalyptic strains. The fragmentation of the people was well-nigh complete before the actual dispersion. The colonization by the Romans of the region they called Judaea was in many ways the familiar story of the people against the nations, of the holy city in contrast to all the human cities, and only the characters were different. Assurances based on primitive precedent that the conflict would end favorably for Israel were dashed by Roman aggression. The power of the Empire proved to be more than just another force to contend with, and Jewish resistance movements were quickly suppressed by a highly organized military regime. Roman provincial administration was aided and abetted by a puppet Jewish dynasty, and the feeling of alienation was pervasive: the proliferation of sects in the first century is evidence of popular anxiety as much as of conflicting claims to authority. But so long as the Temple still stood, there could still be hope that this was a short-lived interregnum. With the siege of Jerusalem and the destruction of the Temple in 70 CE a new phase of Jewish history – and the birth of a cyclical theory of that history – was inaugurated. In the cyclical view lay the only hope for restoration. The poetry of exile from six centuries before had never left the common imagination. Attributed to David and thus thought to have anticipated the first exile, many of the Psalms articulated the anguish of the second exile, which the king presumably also foresaw a millennium before it occurred. Around the Psalms arose new compositions of penitential piety, the expanding corpus of piyyutim that captured each exilic community’s own voice. And, alongside the creation of this body of penitential poetry, there arose a ritual commemorating the disaster. Named only for the date in the calendar assigned to the destruction of both Temples, the Ninth of Av observes the shadow side of divine redemptive activity. The day is one of mourning and is marked by tears: indeed, tears are the mitzvah of the day.23 Within the tradition it mattered little whether Tisha b’Av dated from the first exile or late antiquity; likewise the readings – especially the Book of Lamentations, attributed to Jeremiah – were deemed to have a timeless quality that forestalled curiosity into details about their composition. Other readings for this fast day, like the kinnot, have references to the Romans’ devastation of the Temple.24 In exile the morning service as we know it includes the recitation of sacrificial specifications, surely a poignant accentuation of the people’s loss.25

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THE LONG DISPERSION Conceptually as well as materially, the Gaonic era was conditioned by the experience of exile. The first millennium saw the institutionalizing of Diaspora Judaism manifested in the creation of the great Babylonian academies and the codification of the Talmudic corpus.26 As with its primitive antecedent, the unity and particularity of Israel are articulated in a state of tension with other cultures. Hence contact (to borrow a term used for the encounter of Europeans and Native Americans) must be considered as critical a shaper of medieval Jewish thought as exile was during the Second Temple period. And the harvest of the Gaonic era may be found in the exegetical and apologetic literature of the Sephardic tradition. In migration and settlement alike, this branch of the Diaspora had come to grips with dislocation in its various forms. Exiles since the Babylonian dispersion, Israelites of the Sepharad possessed a cultural tradition in which being removed from Zion and yet native to the Iberian Peninsula since before the advent of Christians and Muslims were held in a constructive tension. For obvious reasons, each dialectical relationship between a dominant and a marginal culture plays out in its own way. In the case of Mediterranean Jewish thought, the task of establishing philosophical cogency bears a heavy burden, since the defense of the rationality of Judaism requires explaining a historical narrative that runs counter to typical rational expectations. The cogency of belief in divine protection would by ordinary circumstances have been exhausted after a millennium. And the rise of Christianity and Islam might easily have decimated the Iberian remnant of Israel. Exactly the opposite appears to have happened. Sephardic Jewry thrived in its foreign setting, becoming prosperous and stable and enjoying the culture of learning that social stability makes possible. Islam and Christianity were also stable and literate, and this may have been a factor in preserving a strong Jewish presence. What is beyond question is the coexistence of cognate but distinct systems of thought, and the role that Islam and Christianity played in shaping medieval Jewish thought. As we have already described, the Israelite narrative that became the procrustean bed of Judaic self-consciousness is one in which stability and instability are held in a tension resolved only by divine action in reward or punishment for Israel’s observance or disobedience. A useful theodicy in good times and (especially) bad, the crescendo of beginnings offered hope of yet another new beginning under a new Cyrus and a new Ezra (himself a postexilic Moses) during periods of adversity. Hence the Torah narrative was a prophetic revelation as well as an historical record, and as they absorbed it the people located themselves in the middle of the story and not as their ancestors’ relicts in a distant and unconnected later era. With the Babylonian Exile and restoration as precedent, the communities in the Roman dispersion read their own future in the historical books.

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The ascendancy of medieval Christianity came at a steep cost, for it seemed to require, as part of its recognition of Christian triumph, acknowledgement of the end of the era of Jewish Messianism. After the institution of the Holy Roman Empire such ascendancy and decline were facts of Christian salvation history too obvious to demand critical scrutiny. Within the Jewish communities of the Diaspora, on the other hand, emerged a conception of divine control over human history that reinvigorated the fragmented populace in accentuating certain definitional themes of covenantal history. The short exile of the sixth century BCE, memorialized in liturgy and literature, shaped the piety and thought of the people during the long one that followed the Roman siege of Palestine in the first century CE. Dominant among the sustaining themes of Diaspora Judaism was the moral sovereignty of their divine agent.27 That the Jewish deity is never unjust or capricious was the central conviction of the scattered communities. Moreover, they held firmly to a belief in divine control over the entire course of human affairs: the same deity worked with a uniform will both within the covenant and beyond it. The operative difference was perceptual: the Jews saw their deity working broadly within history, even among those unaware of that work. Thus the medieval Jewish view of God comfortably answered questions concerning divine control over the shifting amalgamations of oblivious gentile tribes.28 From such a privileged perspective on the events in the larger world, medieval Jewish thinkers identified God as both truth and the source of truth, a conviction that cast the shadow of falsehood over all alternate understandings of events and their causes. Revelation in Torah, being the accessible form of divine truth, transcends mundane conditions in order to speak to the people in an authoritative and unvarying form. Lack of clarity in perceiving this revelation is not due to the ambiguity of the expression but to a deficiency in human comprehension. This construal of the terms by which revelation may be understood was systematized early, notably in the Mesopotamian academies dedicated to preserving and interpreting Torah in its broadest sense. Representing a transfer of spiritual authority from priesthood to rabbinate, the Gaonic era was an initial step in a transition described by Jacob Neusner as the turn from philosophy to religion.29 However one might describe it, what we find in the Judaism of late antiquity is the completion of a hermeneutic begun with the textualization of Torah in the middle of the first millennium BCE. During these early centuries, as we saw, the domain of divine sovereignty was clarified with respect to benevolence and disfavor, with the former being defined as God’s proper state, but conditional on correct observance on the part of the covenantal people. In the latter stages of the process, in a new exile, the preservation of piety demanded a hermeneutical option in which the wrath of God, for which empirical evidence abounded, was held subordinate to divine benevolence. Hence in the work of Saadia Gaon (882–942), uncertainty is the result of confusion about the object of inquiry or lack of thoroughness in the pursuit

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of knowledge, obstacles overcome with awareness and guidance of the source of true understanding.30 For Saadia, intellectual curiosity is to be restrained by revelation in Torah and the prophets; and speculation about the cosmos is to be confined to what God has communicated through these means. They serve as the sole source of all useful knowledge about past and future.31 Hence the scriptural tradition limits the range of speculation while extending the understanding of past and future with canonical disclosure of things beyond human cognition. Concerned as he is with cosmogonical speculation, Saadia submits to biblical revelation particularly in those questions considered unverifiable by scientific or metaphysical inquiry.32 In so doing he offers a critique of pagan doctrines, all of which in his view are insufficient in accounting for the order of things.33 For Saadia, an eternal creator as described in scripture and the prophets is the necessary and transcendent source of all that is. And this deity is revealed through nature herself as being alive, omnipotent, and omniscient.34 Clear as Saadia is in identifying the scriptural God as the creator, he makes it equally clear that the divine attributes cannot be understood in the same way that other things can. There is no analogy between creator and creation; thus terms like knowledge and will, as well as anthropomorphic language such as eyes and limbs, while they express to some extent the divine nature and activity, cannot capture the absolutely incomprehensible essence of God.35 However inaccessible the divine attributes actually are, Saadia’s deity does not act contrary to reason, and this quality is manifest in the realm of rewards and punishments. As in human relations, where good deeds are rewarded and evil ones punished, so does the biblical God reward the worshipful and obedient and punish those who violate the precepts in Torah.36 All narrative, in Saadia’s view, is made up of three parts: law, both positive and negative; conditions of reward and punishment; and actual examples of goodness rewarded and its opposite punished.37 With reference to Torah, some of the precepts are rationally cogent while others elude any attempt to divine a purpose. Examples in the former category help to justify divine law to human reason, while seemingly arbitrary laws underscore the unknowability of God’s will.38 Certain thinkers in the Jewish tradition who felt that the law was subject to abrogation received forceful rebuke in Saadia’s Book. Saadia holds that revealed law is perpetually in force and he affirms the ‘extended’ meaning of ‘olam when it is applied to the validity of the law.39 Any apparent obstruction to observance or rational perplexity as to the purpose of revealed law is due solely to human incapacity. Knowledge of God is full awareness of the working of divine justice in the world, and in the nature of the case such knowledge will necessarily and always be incomplete. Questions about worldly disorder, and particularly about the exile of the chosen people, on the other hand, are never left unanswered in this philosophy.

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With the work of Jehudah HaLevi (c. 1075–1141) we find one of the first differential expositions of Judaism: that is, a description which at the same time indicates its salient differences from other patterns of thought. The Kuzari, an extended dialogue in five parts, juxtaposes Judaism alongside Islam, Christianity, and Greek philosophy in a competition for the conversion of a Khazar monarch. At least partially fictitious, the scenario is an unlikely one insofar as the culture of an exiled people should have had little appeal to a settled one, even one that only recently had been nomadic. Whether the rabbi of HaLevi’s dialogue was ever in his court, however, there is strong evidence that the Khazar king actually converted, with his subjects following suit. We are sufficiently sure that the dialogue we have is more HaLevi’s composition than any exchange that actually took place, so it is revealing that the rabbi in The Kuzari holds to Torah as the foundation of his defense.40 The rabbi convinces the Khazar monarch that the biblical account of creation is valid, that the Exodus narrative is true, and that nothing in Torah is contrary to logic. He describes to King Bulan the rewards of observance and the intimacy of the faithful with God, regardless of material circumstances. With reference to the emphasis Christianity and Islam place on humility and patience, the rabbi asserts that ‘our degree of closeness to God is now greater than if we had achieved greatness in this world.’41 HaLevi uses the dialogue form to engage in a lengthy disquisition on creation, itself an apologetic for revelation and prophecy against reason and observation.42 Ostensibly prepared for a people recently settled and longing for a providential reference-point, The Kuzari offers assurance to a long-unsettled people seeking reasons to hold fast to their own story of providential design in history. The Greek tradition of metaphysical speculation, carried on in the interest of often highly practical concerns, continued almost unabated during the centuries between the collapse of the Platonic Academy in the sixth century and the rediscovery of Aristotle in the Latin West in the thirteenth. The line of development progressed through early Islam and the Sephardic tradition, the latter coming to more friendly terms with foreign cultures than its Hellenistic-era forebears.43 Within the Jewish tradition, no author looms as large as Moses ben Maimon, better known as Maimonides (1135–1204), whose works both in Arabic and Hebrew continue lines of investigation already underway in the Islamic theological tradition of Kalam.44 Known today as the preeminent Jewish philosopher of the middle ages, in his own time, and by his own declaration, Maimonides was a biblical interpreter. He was also one who had experienced exile, having been driven from Spain with his family to settle in Egypt, then under Shi’ite Fatimid rule, and he earned his living as a court physician while maintaining a position of leadership in the Jewish community of Fostat.45 Hence any efforts to understand his thought must take both exegetical and systematic strains of his work, and their interdependence, into account.46 That both were shaped by a strong concept of divine order is indisputable. Of greater concern for our present purposes is a clear under-

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standing of what Maimonides meant by divine order, since his own circumstances were paradigmatic of the deviant state that is exile. Conceptions of order became entangled in a disorderly dissonance during the first centuries of encounter between revealed (biblical) and rational (classical) sources of understanding. An orderly cosmos is presupposed in philosophical inquiry – one cannot understand a random array of data – and a purposeful sovereignty equally underlies theological discourse, the task of which is to reconcile experience with traditional conceptions of deity.47 Arguably a perennial problem, the task of coordinating reason and piety becomes especially difficult when one of the two seems to have compelling cogency: that is, when it seems that reason has nullified revelation. Possibly apart from his own intentions, Maimonides has been credited with a ‘subversive’ mode of writing. That is, he is thought to have written in a fashion that conveyed both an exterior and an ulterior meaning, a distinction assumed since the Hellenistic era to be present in biblical revelation as well. Maimonides may well have been offering his own text as an instance of encoded discourse: he writes at such length about the levels of scriptural meaning that the perplexities of his own readers might have taken both naïve and sophisticated forms. Maimonides certainly navigated a course between literal and figurative interpretations of scripture. Never abandoning his sense that Torah literally means what it says unless that meaning is conclusively disproved, Maimonides is a forceful apologist for the revealed tradition. His Guide is intended for those willing to submit empirical knowledge to supernatural guidance. The ‘perplexed’ he addresses are those torn between seemingly contrasting truth claims; as a teacher (Moreh) Maimonides’ goal is to bring all knowledge together under the rubric of divine revelation. In Maimonides’ mind it goes without question that all knowledge is unitary, and he is equally convinced that the driving intention provides the unifying catalyst. Hence empirical research uncorroborated by revelation must be held as provisional, while biblical narrative uncompromised by scientific modification is to be taken as truth. In the Guide Maimonides assesses the merits of four conceptions of divine providence – two Greek, two Islamic – and none of them is in his view fully adequate.48 His fifth view, which he claims is the only acceptable one, is rooted in Torah and maintains a tension between a divinely willed human freedom and an unambiguous declaration of divine expectation. For Maimonides, conformity by the free will to the demands of the Law, or the failure to conform, accounts for all divine activity in the world. In the Maimonidean cosmos, the freedom of the will is experienced on the human side, and measured in the divine realm, by voluntary activity in the knowledge of revealed law. Divine judgment is a moral verdict pronounced on human activity, meaningful only in a setting in which the human agent is sufficiently free to be judged. Law does not bind, but guides; without freedom the revelation of the divine will would have been redundant.

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Maimonides is readily and rightly acknowledged as the exemplar of medieval Jewish philosophy, an icon of the tradition. Less frequently mentioned is the extent to which his work may be the cry of exile. The protracted migrations of his family gave the youthful Maimonides an immediate sense of the meaning of alienation, and may have contributed to his Platonesque, if not outright Platonic, philosophy.49 Maimonides was not silent about his personal travails, and there is evidence throughout his work that he had earned the luxury of contemplation at great cost. It is not an exaggeration to say that his personal struggles intensified the estrangement that had been the collective experience of the Sephardim. ‘Moses ben Maimon from Spain,’ as he styled himself long after his family had left the Iberian Peninsula, was like his patriarchal namesake destined to know the land of promise only as that: a promise. And promises are true intentionally, with the conscious commitment being proportional to the magnitude of the promise. Linguistically my statement that I will lend you my pencil and my pledge to bequeath you a vast fortune may be formally equivalent; but hermeneutically your assent to either promise is based on a relation of trust. Living within the space of that trust may change your habits slightly or your whole life significantly. Believing my assurance about a mundane object is easy, but the promise will be realized in a tightly localized way, such as when you need something with which to write. The more substantial promise, if trusted, may lead you to a life of expectation in which all your decisions are based on the certainty that the promise will be realized. (You might make a down payment on an unaffordable house.) Combine the assurance of the mundane promise, which you believe because I am known for such small gestures, with the expectation of the stupendous bequest, and you have something approaching the trust which Maimonides describes as faith. Assenting to a revealed statement in the Maimonidean fashion is thus as much an act of will as it is a process of reason. For Maimonides, the cogency of any proposition rests on its correspondence with a view of the world already shaped by cultural factors such as certain belief in a final redemption. In Moses ben Nachman (1194–1270) we have an interpreter of Judaism from Catalonia and a mediator between the Sephardic communities of Spain and Southern France during a time when the French rabbinical establishment imposed bans on Maimonides’ work. He also defended Talmudic literature against claims that it contained Christian teachings, and as a result was instrumental in keeping Dominican preachers from preaching proselytizing sermons in synagogues.50 With the aid of the Catalonian king, Nachmanides (to call him by his more familiar Latinate name) emigrated to Palestine and spend his final years trying to establish – unsuccessfully – a synagogue and house of study in Jerusalem.51 As had Maimonides, Nachmanides had a perspective on exile that might with a twinge of irony be considered privileged. It was also a perspective shaped by intimate knowledge of the Patriarchal narrative, which he saw as ‘a sign for their descendants.’52 In his commentary on the Pentateuch he pays

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close attention to questions of location, contrasting wanderings and dwellingplaces with a care that reflects a sense of their meaning for those experiencing dislocation.53 Nachmanides finds poignancy in the divine command that Abraham leave his homeland, noting how difficult it is to leave one’s birthplace, family, and friends.54 And yet in describing the Tent of Meeting at the end of Exodus, Nachmanides strikes the familiar chord of affirmation, ‘Blessed be God, Who desires the welfare of his servant, Who has enabled him to come this far. … Blessed be he of Whose bounty we have ‘eaten’ and by Whose beneficence we live!’55 In defending the canonical narrative as more compelling than other current patterns of thought, Jewish philosophers and exegetes found themselves defining anew the terms for certainty, or more precisely clarifying the boundary between the knowable and the mysterious. That the divine design appeared to occupy the latter category was all too evident, and that alternate systems were triumphing in ways that the primitive ‘cities’ of their history did not, prompted concentrated effort to reconcile the contradictions between material circumstances and assurance of redemption. In so doing they were anchoring their own work all the more deeply in the commitment to the proposition that divine sovereignty is unknowable without intuition.56 In the next chapter we turn to figures who understand intuition as the medium for any possible knowledge of the divine design.

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Notes 1 2 3 4 5

6 7 8

9

10

11

12 13

Robert Eisen, The Book of Job in Medieval Jewish Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004) 203–20. For the afterlife of the special history see Jonathan Boyarin, ‘Reading Exodus into History,’ New Literary History 23 (1992) 523–54. Ronald S. Hendel, ‘Israel among the Nations: Biblical Culture in the Ancient Near East,’ in CJ 1, 43–75; on shifting definitions of Israel over time see, e.g., Jacob Neusner, ‘Israel the People in Judaism, the Classical Statement,’ EJ2 2.1137–52. The entries on Torah and Tradition by Jacob Neusner and Alan J. Avery-Peck at EJ2 4.2724–64 are useful here; the distinction is structural to the tradition and will thus be found in any worthwhile introductory treatment of Judaism. The term ‘Early Judaism’ for the post-Exilic history was popularized, if not coined, by Lawrence B. Browne, Early Judaism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1920); it has since become standard, though sometimes it has been applied only to the Hellenistic era (330 BCE to the Roman conquest in the second century CE) as for example in Robert A. Kraft and G. W. Nickelsburg, eds., Early Judaism and Its Modern Interpreters (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1986). Martin Goodman (‘Jews and Judaism in the Second Temple Period,’ OHJS 36–52) understands the return from the Exile as the beginning of the epoch. An able yet brief introduction to this theme is Niels Peter Lemche, The Israelites in History and Tradition (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 1998) 86–97. M. H. Segal, ‘The Religion of Israel before Sinai,’ JQR 52 (1961) 41–68. Nahum M. Sarna, ‘The Authority and Interpretation of Scripture in Jewish Tradition,’ in Studies in Biblical Interpretation (Philadelphia: JPS, 2000) 67–79; Benjamin D. Sommer, ‘Revelation at Sinai in the Hebrew Bible and in Jewish Theology,’ JR 73 (1999) 422–51; Michael S. Berger, Rabbinic Authority (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998) 83–96. Some of the different forms of explanation are identified by Simon Rawidowicz, ‘On Interpretation,’ PAAJR 26 (1957) 83–126. David E. Klemm, The Hermeneutical Theory of Paul Ricoeur: A Constructive Analysis (Cranbury, NJ: Bucknell University Press, 1983); Werner G. Jeanrond, Theological Hermeneutics: Development and Significance (New York: Crossroad, 1991); also Jeanrond, ‘Criteria for New Biblical Theologies,’ JR 76 (1996) 233–49. Steven Knapp, ‘Collective Memory and the Actual Past,’ Representations 26 (1989) 123–49; Jeffrey K. Olick, ‘Collective Memory: The Two Cultures,’ Sociological Theory 17 (1999) 333–48; Alon Confino, ‘Collective Memory and Cultural History: Problems of Method,’ AHR 102 (1997) 1386–1403. The tradition of study originates with the work of Maurice Halbwachs (1877–1945); for a selection of his works see Maurice Halbwachs on Collective Memory, ed. Lewis A. Coser (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992); and for his contribution to contemporary inquiry, Paul Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting, tr. Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004) 120–24. The phenomenon theorized as ‘habit memory’ is pertinent on this point; see Paul Connerton, How Societies Remember (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989) 23–25. Susan A. Crane, ‘Writing the Individual Back onto Collective Memory,’ AHR 102 (1997) 1372–85; Wulf Kansteiner, ‘Finding Meaning in Memory: A Methodological Critique of Collective Memory Studies,’ H&T 41 (2002) 179–97; James V. Wertsch, Voices of Collective Remembering (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). Jan Assmann limits the timeframe of collective memory to eighty years typically and claims that only rarely does it endure for a century (‘Collective Memory and Cultural Identity,’ NGC 65 [1995] 125–33, here: p. 127). A notable step in this direction is Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, Zakhor: Jewish History and Jewish Memory (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1996), esp. 5–26. Gösta W. Ahlström, Who Were the Israelites? (Winona Lake, Indiana: Eisenbrauns,

42

14

15 16

17

18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25

26 27

28

29 30

Exile and Restoration in Jewish Thought 1986); Philip R. Davies, In Search of ‘Ancient Israel,’ JSOT Suppl. Series, 149 (Sheffield: JSOT Press, 1992); Avi Hurvitz, ‘The Historical Quest for “Ancient Israel” and the Linguistic Evidence of the Hebrew Bible: Some Methodological Observations,’ VT 47 (1997) 301–15. Susan Niditch, Oral Word and Written Word: Ancient Israelite Literature (Louisville: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1996); Ian M. Young, ‘Israelite Literacy: Interpreting the Evidence,’ VT 48 (1998) 239–53, 408–22; William M. Schniedewind, How the Bible Became a Book: The Textualization of Ancient Israel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). The hermeneutics of faith and the hermeneutics of suspicion, now a commonplace distinction, are elucidated by Gerald L. Bruns, ‘What is Tradition?’ New Literary History 22 (1991) 1–21. Such being a possibly later and more xenophobic viewpoint; contemporary records indicate a variety of attempts to reconcile Jewish and Greek cultures; see Erich S. Gruen, Heritage and Hellenism: The Reinvention of Jewish Tradition (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998) 292–97, and ‘Diaspora and Homeland,’ in Diasporas and Exiles: Varieties of Jewish Identity, ed. Howard Wettstein (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002) 18–46. Gruen’s position is supported by John J. Collins, ‘Hellenistic Judaism in Recent Scholarship,’ EJ2 2.969–80. The traditional dominant narrative in which conflict of Jewish and Greek cultures is accentuated is well represented by Louis H. Feldman, Jew and Gentile in the Ancient World: Attitudes and Interactions from Alexander to Justinian (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993). See Jean Pépin, La tradition de l’allégorie de Philon d’Alexandrie à Dante: Etudes historiques (Paris: Etudes Augustiniennes, 1987); Edmund Stein, Die allegorische Exegese des Philo aus Alexandreia (Giessen: Töpelmann, 1929); David T. Runia, ‘The Structure of Philo’s Allegorical Treatises,’ VC 38 (1984) 209–56. For his place in the Judaism of his time see C. Mondésert, ‘Philo of Alexandria,’ in CHJ 3, 877–900; on his Platonized piety see David Winston, ‘Philo and the Contemplative Life,’ in JS 1, 198–231. Philo, Allegorical Interpretation of Genesis, I.56–59 (LCL Philo, vol. 1, 182–85). Philo, On the Creation, §§143–44 (LCL Philo, vol. 1, 112–15). Philo, The Posterity and Exile of Cain, §10 (LCL Philo, vol. 2, 332–33). Philo, The Posterity and Exile of Cain, §34 (LCL Philo, vol. 2, 347). The Complete Tisha b’Av Service, ed. Avrohom Chaim Feuer and Avie Gold (New York: Mesorah Publications, 1998) xi. Kinnah 16 is understood to refer to the Emperor Titus, even though he is not named in the Hebrew text (Complete Tisha b’Av Service, 226–27) Complete Tisha b’Av Service, 86–97. To be sure, similar precepts are found throughout the liturgical cycle, but the close focus on the destruction of the Temple intensifies the evocative power of these passages, like reading the recipe of a deceased parent’s favorite meal – on his or her yahrzeit. Robert Brody, The Geonim of Babylonia and the Shaping of Medieval Jewish Culture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998) 137–66. Abraham’s challenge to God at Gen. 18:25 (+p#m h#(y )l Cr)h-lk +p#h) resonates through the memory of the Jewish people. See MR 1.429–30; Rashi 1.75; AS Gen. (vol. 1a) 664–65; The Pentateuch and Haftorahs, 2nd edn., ed. J. H. Hertz (London: Soncino Press,1960) 65–66. They were oblivious, that is, of the way in which God was operating them on behalf of the Jews; the Christian communities, in Jewish eyes, had been unwittingly seduced by a false messiah (conceptually continuing the sectarian divisions of the first century), while still-pagan peoples were the new gentiles of the Jewish imagination. Jacob Neusner, The Transformation of Judaism: From Philosophy to Religion (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992). Saadia Gaon, The Book of Beliefs and Opinions, tr. Samuel Rosenblatt, YJS 1 (New

Forged in Exile 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44

45

46

47 48

49 50 51 52 53

43

Haven: Yale University Press, 1948) 4–9. Book of Beliefs and Opinions, Introduction §6, 28–29. Book of Beliefs and Opinions, 1.22, 46–50. Book of Beliefs and Opinions, 1.3, 50–83. Book of Beliefs and Opinions, 2.4, 101. Book of Beliefs and Opinions, 2.9–11, 112–27. Book of Beliefs and Opinions, 3.1, 139–40. Book of Beliefs and Opinions, 3.6, 155. Book of Beliefs and Opinions, 3.2, 142–44. Book of Beliefs and Opinions, 3.9, 171. Yehuda Halevi, The Kuzari: In Defense of the Despised Faith, tr. N. Daniel Korobkin (Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson, 1998) §12, p. 12. The Kuzari, §113, p. 51. Barry S. Kogan, ‘Judah Halevi and His Use of Philosophy in the Kuzari,’ in The Cambridge Companion to Medieval Jewish Philosophy, ed. Daniel H. Frank and Oliver Leaman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003) 111–35. See Steven Harvey, ‘Islamic Philosophy and Jewish Philosophy,’ in The Cambridge Companion to Arabic Philosophy, ed. Peter Adamson and Richard C. Taylor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005) 349–69. On this school of Islamic philosophy and its relation to medieval Jewish thought see Harry Austryn Wolfson, The Philosophy of the Kalam (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1976); also Mauro Zonta, ‘Linee del pensiero islamico nella storia della filosofia ebraica medievale,’ Annali dell’Istituto Orientale di Napoli 57 (1976) 101–144, 450–483. Herbert A. Davidson, Moses Maimonides: The Man and His Works (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005) 28–46. For the impact of his own experience on his thought, see Salo W. Baron, ‘The Historical Outlook of Maimonides,’ PAAJR 6 (1934–35) 5–113. See David Hartman, Maimonides: Torah and Philosophic Quest (Philadelphia: JPS, 1976) 139–86 and the essays by Arthur Hyman, Leo Strauss, and Joseph A. Buijs in Maimonides: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Joseph A Buijs (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1988) 19–70. John Gray, ‘The Hebrew Conception of the Kingship of God: Its Origin and Development,’ VT 6 (1956) 268–85; also Gray, ‘The Kingship of God in the Prophets and Psalms,’ VT 11 (1961) 1–29. Maimonides, The Guide of the Perplexed, 3.17, tr. Shlomo Pines (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963), vol. 2, 464–74; on his understanding of the classical and Islamic doctrines see Alfred L. Ivry, ‘The Guide and Maimonides’ Philosophical Sources,’ in The Cambridge Companion to Maimonides, ed. Kenneth Seeskin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005) 58–81. Hermann Cohen, however, will call Maimonides a ‘radical Platonist’ (Ethics of Maimonides, tr. A. S. Bruckstein [Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2004] 23–47). Robert Chazan, ‘The Barcelona “Disputation” of 1263: Christian Missionizing and Jewish Response,’ Speculum 52 (1977) 824–42. For an overview of his thought, see David Novak, The Theology of Nahmanides Systematically Presented, BJS 271 (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1992). Nachmanides at Gen 12:6 (AS Ramban 1; New York: Mesorah, 2004), 293, echoing an earlier midrash on this passage. See, for example, his discussion of Cain’s building of a city at Gen. 4:17 (AS Ramban 1; New York: Mesorah, 2004) 145–46, as well as of the corruption of the whole world during Nimrod’s reign (256), in each case posing questions absent from Rashi. Note also his use of hglp@ (used for the parting of streams at Job 20:17and of tribes at Judges 5:15) for the dispersion of peoples at Gen 11:2 (266–67); the usual term is Cw@p@ which occurs at 11:8.

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54 Ramban on Gen. 12.1, vol. 1, 289. 55 Ramban on Exodus 40–34–38; AS Ramban 4 (New York: Mesorah, 2007) 559; capitalization of the pronoun in the original. 56 José Faur, ‘Intuitive Knowledge of God in Medieval Jewish Theology,’ JQR n.s. 67 (1977) 90–110.

Chapter 3

TRADITION AND INTUITION

NEARNESS OF THE HOLY While trust in divine benevolence and hope in eventual restoration are the bedrock of medieval Jewish piety, the relation of present adversity and future fulfillment was not necessarily constructed as a contrast. In point of fact, traces of the divine presence attested to the continued sovereignty of the biblical deity, displaying as well the defining attributes of order, justice, and harmony. These divine qualities were recondite in a world seemingly turned upside down, but they were present nonetheless, and discernible to those with properly trained intuitive faculties. Gershom Scholem, whose contributions to the study of Jewish mysticism are nothing less than monumental, perceptively commented that mysticism is a stage in the development of religion and ‘makes its appearance under certain well-defined conditions.’1 Scholem was referring to creative impulses within fixed traditions of belief, attempts to preserve an experiential element amidst the dogmatization and systematization that occurs in the maturing of a religion. The Judaism that was maturing was the Diasporic form: in other words, the exilic state had become domesticated and woven into the pattern of thought and practice. It is questionable that Jewish thought (still heavily exegetical) had actually become so systematized as to trigger a movement of affective spirituality from within. It is more likely that the external condition of marginality was the effective cause in the flowering of Kabbalah in thirteenth-century Spain. So much has been written about the Kabbalistic strain in medieval Judaism that the careful interpreter recoils from attempting to describe it. However, we cannot ignore that the mysticism of the sefirot was a powerful medium for the religious impulse and a valuable example of intuitionism during an era in which reason, as we saw in the last chapter, was deemed insufficient. The first point to note is that the tradition is mythically set during the Rabbinic period and flourished in Spain in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. It is the spirituality of exile. As with so much of the culture, the biblical narrative anchored the system of mystical speculation. The Zohar (Book of Splendor), not the first but undeniably the greatest work in the Kabbalistic tradition, is ostensibly a

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midrash on the Pentateuch. And, typically for the exegetical genre, its discussions range far and wide in attempting to round out the scriptural narrative. With the interpretive latitude allowed by the revelational role of Oral Torah, the fictional sages expound creation and providence, the entire epic in fact, in terms of the ten levels of divine emanation.2 The familiar diagram of the sefirot is roughly anthropomorphic, giving the impression that the divine attributes are as present as each person’s limbs, provided one intuits their significance.3 The role of what would later be called intentionality is all too evident in the literature.4 Sephardic culture, in its late-medieval golden age, may have been justifiably ambivalent about its Diasporic identity. Exiled yet domesticated on foreign soil, Iberian Jewry was for much of its history no more marginal than the Jewish segment of the Alexandrian population or the communities surrounding the Babylonian academies during the Gaonic era. The differential defenses of Torah, contrasting the Mosaic epic with its Christian and Islamic counterparts, preserved the sensibility of being in exile and reminded them of a fragility that might not have been obvious in day-to-day life under royal protection.5 The haggadot created during these centuries are powerful artifacts reflecting the duality of stable prosperity and the desire for return to the authentic homeland, Jerusalem. The Iberian Diaspora, together with the larger Islamic establishment, were decisively broken. On 31 March 1492 King Ferdinand of Aragon signed a decree that gave the Jews of Spain until 1 August to leave lands they had occupied for over a millennium.6 Despite political and ecclesiastical suppression, the Iberian Peninsula had been the home of Jewish settlers since the beginnings of the Roman Empire. Spanish soil had nurtured prosperous communities of merchants and intellectuals: with the decline of the Babylonian academies in the tenth century, Cordova became the unofficial capital of Mediterranean Jewry, the Andalusian region a home to schools and synagogues.7 Moses Maimonides (1135–1204) from Cordova and the Castilian-born Moses de Leon (c. 1240–1305) shaped the later course of Jewish philosophy and mysticism. Of Maimonides it was said that ‘From Moses to Moses there was none like Moses,’ though to do justice to the Zohar of Moses de Leon we should say that there were none like these two Moseses. If there was a golden age of Diaspora Judaism, it was likely to be found in the medieval Sephardic tradition. We need to be cautious, however, if tempted to idealize this epoch, because life in the Diaspora was never the normative state for the Jewish people. Exile was exile no matter how comfortable or how durable the prosperity, and the fragility of dislocation had been driven home by sporadic sanctions and persecutions since the fourth century. South of Toledo the peninsula was an Islamic caliphate, and although the Muslims may have been generally more tolerant than the Christians, autonomy for the Jews was tenuous at best. Diaspora piety emphasized penitence and hope, the former reflecting responsibility for being in a state of exile, the latter affirming trust in a benevolent divine sovereign.8

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Exile and redemption, being structural elements of Jewish experience, are fixed components of the self-understanding of the covenantal people. And if we see this self-understanding taking shape during the Second Temple period, we recognize that exile came first. Yet divine sovereignty, being ever active in the world, provokes continual reflection on the events befalling any given fragment of the scattered people, historical study being devoted to discerning the divine intention in each sequence of events.9 Hence it is entirely in keeping with the Jewish historical sensibility to see the expulsion of 1492, like the persecution of a century before, as a divine visitation demanding pious response.10 The expulsion did more than dislocate the Jews geographically; it revived a forgotten conception of the order of history. The themes of penance and hope that echo through the Psalms and later additions to that body of exileinspired hymnody are augmented by broad swaths of penitential poetry and moments of fervent anticipation of an imminent redemption. During unusually turbulent times, the distance in time between the Diaspora and the redemption tends to be measured not in advancing years from past events, but in diminishing time until the approaching restoration.11 There may be no clearly acknowledged central theme in a tradition as fragmented and unsystematic as late-medieval Judaism, but among the ubiquitous concepts, Messianism surely ranks with the most important.12 It was an indisputable element of the faith that time was ordered and directed by a divine creator, whose will, and thus the course of history, would be discernible through revelation properly interpreted. It was equally beyond question that this interpretation was concealed from all who might use it for ungodly purposes, and protected even within the tradition as a secret knowledge imparted only to those over forty with mystical insights. DIASPORA EXTENDED The community that migrated east along the southern coast of the Mediterranean was following the footsteps of Maimonides and an ancient ambition to return to Zion. They did so anticipating a final and durable restoration of the covenantal life revealed on Sinai after the Exodus. With that event, divine sovereignty became fully present and active, and the piety of the people expressed an understanding that God’s hand in history would be always visible – to them, and on the condition that God always be recognized as acting benevolently on the Jews’ behalf.13 But the hope of eventual restoration held that the reversal could come at any time and take the most peculiar of forms. Peculiar but recognizable, even under the cloak of irony, such as when a worldly power acts to oppress the Jews with laws and policies designed to deprive them of their identity among the nations of the earth. The community of Sephardic exiles who settled in Safed distinguished themselves in various ways, most notably in their affirmations of the presence

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of the divine, already to some extent in their midst. The famous Sabbath hymn L’kha dodi (Come, my beloved) by Shlomo Ha-Levi Alkabetz (1505–c. 1576) depicts the delight of the seventh day as a royal bride entering into union with the much-loved groom, namely the expectant congregation. Characteristic of a community that looks both backward and forward, this hymn echoes the piety of the Song of Songs in the allegorical interpretation that was long regarded as its only authentic meaning. In the Safed community we see Kabbalah in an emphatically practical form: a worldview linked to a dynamic rather than a static eschatology, one in which the union of God and Israel, of body and spirit, of theory and practice, will be imminently realized.14 In much of this literature we find perfection taking the place that penance had occupied in medieval piety. The people are already in a redemptive frame of mind, and their words and actions are better understood as responses than as petitions. The Palm Tree of Deborah by Moshe Cordovero (1522–70) is a manual of practical Kabbalah, a guide to displaying the sefirot in one’s own actions. The individual is the medium for disseminating the ten divine attributes to the world: a notable shift in emphasis from the divine properties being discernible only to a privileged caste of mystical initiates. There were acceptable levels of charismatic authority, and quite a few instances in which excessive enthusiasm proved intolerable to the communities looking up to their leaders. Most notorious was Shabbetai Zevi (1626–76), a false messiah of the most egregious form.15 Convinced by a mystical follower that he was the long-awaited messiah, Shabbetai attracted an enthusiastic following eager for an apocalyptic moment in 1666 which never came – nor did it come a year later, after he recalculated the time of redemption. Disgraced among his followers, and without any more success after his conversion to Islam, Shabbetai’s legacy was the negative one of instilling a deep suspicion toward any claims to knowing the divine plan for history. At the other end of the spectrum of charismatic leaders stands the rabbi of Prague known as the Maharal. Jehudah Löw (c. 1520–1609) was of an earlier generation, his synagogue an established part of the city for centuries. Biblical scholar and mystic, Rabbi Löw wrote commentaries on Torah, treatises on the Holy Days, and practical instructions and legal resolutions for his followers during a time of trouble and uncertainty.16 A man revered for his heroic sanctity, the Maharal is also known in connection with the legend of the golem, a creature made from clay that was said to come alive in order to protect the Jews when commanded to do so by its maker.17 The legend of the Maharal and the golem (and the sources are such that we can only call it a legend) stands pointedly in contrast with the all-too-historical episode of Shabbetai. Crafting a being to which God gives organic life for the protection of the people is one thing, claiming divine privilege for oneself is quite another.

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THE PHILOSOPHICAL TURN Jews who migrated to the Netherlands were mostly Marranos, Sephardim who had nominally converted to Christianity in order to remain on Iberian soil until they too were driven out.18 In Amsterdam they found a tolerant environment and a thriving mercantile community in which they could participate with few restrictions. Thanks to the favorable economic and cultural conditions, the Sephardic community was able to build a synagogue and school, and hired rabbis and teachers from Venice, Florence, Paris, and elsewhere, who had little in common except the influence of Christianity and secular philosophy on their thought: influence that some incorporated and others rejected in the liberal air of Amsterdam.19 To bring uniformity to such dissonance was perhaps an impossible task. The desire for unity within the community contrasted with the openness of the secular environment, and the tolerance experienced in the outer conditions failed to permeate the sanctuary that was the beneficiary of that liberal outlook. The best known representative of the Northern migration of Sephardic Jews was Baruch Spinoza (1632–77), an unassuming craftsman in Amsterdam who polished lenses for a living and shook the religious and philosophical communities with his writing, composed in relative obscurity and most of it published posthumously. Writing in Latin for an educated readership comprising gentiles and Jews alike, Spinoza crafted a philosophy intended to appeal to the scientific spirit of his time. He wrote to the readers of Descartes and Pascal rather than to members of the covenantal tradition; and it is not hard to see that what he wrote for this audience was too much for his fellow Jews to bear. Accused of unspecified ‘horrible heresies and monstrous actions,’ Spinoza was excommunicated from the people of Israel in a decree by the ruling authorities of the Sephardic synagogue of Amsterdam on 27 July 1656.20 These alleged heresies and abominations, however they were construed by the local rabbinate, were the fruit of an attempt to reconcile the Jewish worldview with that of the gentile philosophical tradition, an enterprise underway since Jews began reading Aristotle.21 Spinoza’s work is very much the product of a theological tradition, and more clearly understood as a constructive adaptation within Jewish thought than as a repudiation of the constitutive principles of Judaism.22 Echoes of the classics of the medieval Jewish tradition can be found throughout Spinoza’s works, and he for his part never explicitly rejected the tradition or its fundamental tenets. Among these is a sense that history and nature follow a course directed by an absolute and unifying agent. Although he was not a theological writer in any conventional sense, since he worked beyond the perimeter of the Judaic tradition of his time, Spinoza was an original religious thinker who wrote with the subtlety and clarity of a new era in philosophy. And it is ultimately of little benefit to debate whether his work should be classified as theology or as philosophy. It is more valuable

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to discern in his work the preference for order and continuity that finds wholeness in the appearance of chaos. This is the tendency that sets Spinoza’s thought within the scientific mentality of his day while at the same time situating his work within the religious tradition of his forebears. The solution he arrived at may have fallen beyond the limits of tolerable doctrine, but the process of Spinoza’s thought is very much in line with the Jewish philosophical tradition. Spinoza’s work is about God: the divine attributes as well as the possibility of human knowledge of God. God is described as infinite and free, necessarily existing and the immediate cause of everything in the finite material world.23 When Spinoza identifies God with nature, he denies that God is the transcendent being that created the world from nothing and revealed a supernatural will through oral and written Torah. Accordingly, Spinoza rejects traditional notions of election, covenant, and prophecy, none of which is compatible with divinity residing within nature. Spinoza’s awareness of the divine presence in all things is reminiscent of the worldview that sees evidence everywhere of the divine attributes, even if they are discernible only to those with mystical gifts. Traces of the divine are present within nature and culture alike; they are encountered in the forms of wisdom, understanding, kindness, power, truth, kingship, and the like. God’s nature, according to the Kabbalistic system, is boundless and hence beyond comprehension; it becomes knowable only when mediated through the symbols of the sefirot. For Spinoza as well, God’s absoluteness can only be intuited through its manifestations in nature.24 The realm of experience seems to hold the secrets of the divine will, in both Kabbalistic mysticism and the scientific worldview of Spinoza. ‘The first of the moderns’ in H. A. Wolfson’s illuminating description,25 Spinoza was also arguably the first ‘modern’ to demand serious inquiry into the application of traditional categories to thought. In working out new understandings of God, revelation, and the creative conatus of nature, Spinoza sought to renew for his age the cogency of concepts deeply rooted in the Jewish philosophical tradition. Spinoza’s identification as a Jewish thinker remains ambiguous and controversial, an historical problem grounded in questions that need not concern us here. The theological problems that emerge from that same liminal presence within and beyond traditional Judaism take shape in a range of questions that potentially explain a hitherto little recognized aspect of modern religious existentialism. As we will see in chapters that follow, Spinoza’s ambivalent relation to the covenant is echoed in the work of authors who make up a large part of the modern Jewish intellectual tradition. Specifically, their echo of Spinoza takes the form of a tension between the experience of disorder and division, on the one hand, and the need, undeniable yet incomprehensible, to affirm unity and purpose to life generally, on the other. Although Blaise Pascal has been called a proto-Existentialist,26 a valid identification by some senses of the term, there is no need to make a case for altering or extending the definition of Existentialism so as to include Spinoza

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in its canon. Instead, certain facets of his thought may be constructively juxtaposed with the work of some ‘canonical’ Existentialists of the twentieth century. There is little controversy in asserting that Spinoza was a thinker ahead of his time. But it may be useful to point to a seldom recognized aspect of his thought in which that claim may be unusually true. Although terms like naturalism and monism have idiosyncratic meanings which tend to lose their utility when applied to post-Enlightenment thinkers, these concepts were not lost to modernity. Rather, they seem to have resurfaced with the advent of phenomenology and its emphasis on the role of imagination in interpreting what is given to the senses. Investing any material thing with an intangible quality is a revolt against positivism, whether that be in the form of modern scientific reductionism or the legalism of early modern religious communities. Anthropology is indisputably one of the central components of Spinoza’s thought, and arguably the boldest. In denying that human nature is distinct from the laws of nature in general, Spinoza dismisses the possibility that human dominion has any power to disrupt the dominion of nature.27 Throughout the Ethics especially Spinoza subordinates all finite substances to the divine infinite; corrects the illusion of freedom with a doctrine of God as the only sovereign agent; and advances a theory of ideas in which reference to God is the necessary condition for adequacy.28 Such a divinized mechanism, one which affirms the eternity of the world while denying human freedom, demands an epistemology in which the intuitive subordinates the sensible and rational. Intuitive knowledge, scientia intuitiva, proceeds, says Spinoza, ‘from an adequate idea of the absolute essence of certain attributes of God to the adequate knowledge of the essence of things.’29 Hence the complete understanding of any particular thing rests in an awareness of its relation to other things and in its participation in the divine totality.30 The perfection of particulars is marked by their degree of reality and activity, and similarly the perfection of the mind lies in its activity and the extent to which it participates in the ‘eternal and infinite intellect of God.’31 Absolute infinity and supreme perfection, identified by Spinoza in his correspondence as well as in the Ethics as the defining attributes of God, are given substance in his conception of love, arguably the pivot by which his thought turns from philosophy to piety. Just as emotions are converted from passions to actions, so are persons turned from bondage to freedom in adequate knowledge of the emotions. In Spinoza’s words, The intellectual love of the mind toward God is the very love with which he loves himself, not in so far as he is infinite, but in so far as he can be manifested through the essence of the human mind, considered under the form of eternity; that is to say, the intellectual love of the mind toward God is part of the infinite love with which God loves himself.32

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In identifying God with love and the absolute, Spinoza offers a tantalizing link between the affective theology of medieval mystics and the phenomenology of relation that would appear in the twentieth century. Among the thirteenthcentury Cistercians, for example, the love of God is fully realized in participating in God’s love toward humanity, understood in Christian doctrine as divine self-sacrifice undertaken as atonement for original sin. Hence to know God-as-love is to possess the willingness to subordinate one’s own interest to that of the neighbor. The pious Cistercian relinquishes personal autonomy for the sake of yielding to the authentic activity which is divine love, and realizes true selfhood in absorptive union. The understanding of God is necessarily intuitive and expresses itself affectively in such a way that active and passive, subject and object, lose their distinctness, just as a Christian monastic community becomes a single virtual ‘person’ – and just as the biblical people Israel may be said to compose a single subject in relation to God. These examples of organic unity help expose the problem that rational analysis of human moral activity fails to explain the sensation of divine agency in the tangible world. Duality, natural enough to materialist worldviews, is a core problem to the religious worldview.33 The search for nonduality assumes a range of forms in the transition to modernity, and we find that the dominance of intuition over reason is especially pronounced where rabbinic or clerical authority no longer reigns supreme.34 In his exile from his own community, Spinoza created a unity that bound all persons and projected the covenantal unity with God onto nature itself. REDEFINING THE PROPHETIC The anonymous (and illegal, by Dutch law at the time) publication in 1670 of the Tractatus theologico-philosophicus, a work arguably more elusive than the more familiar Ethics, marks a turning-point in Jewish religious thought – or more precisely completes the shift begun in the Ethics.35 Whether a work like the TTP (its conventional abbreviation) could have been composed in different circumstances (by a French Protestant, for example) is a tantalizing speculation.36 What is undeniable is that it expresses alienation in unusually forceful terms. The TTP is an exploration of hidden meanings, with insights into the realm of the recondite, into hiddenness itself, which in part inaugurated a new form of midrash. Spinoza also provides a commentary on ecclesiastical culture, one that would have been considered radical by anyone assuming that the nameless author was actually a member of a Christian church. Spinoza in the Tractatus combines discrete modes of thought in a new way, constructing a theological program that has little in common with any other theologies of the time, and applying them to a noticeably apolitical form of social thought. In fact Spinoza’s task was neither theology nor politics in the modern senses of those terms, but there was no common name for what he

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was attempting in the TTP. In lieu of presenting God as the agent, Spinoza interprets ‘God’ as a symbol of a reality operating in a non-theistic cosmos. As a constructive contribution to biblical interpretation, the TTP is one of the more creative efforts in the tradition. But its very originality placed it beyond the boundaries that the tradition had set, given early convictions about the necessary source of revelation.37 Until the nineteenth century is was inconceivable that revelation might be regarded as a projection of the sublime in human experience. Inconceivable to all but Spinoza, that is. The TTP is a commentary on the nature and operation of revealed religion, its themes distributed across various loci, being prophetic knowledge, scripture, and the role of ritual in life. The question at the center of the inquiry, anticipating postmodern speculation by three centuries, is the definition of the sacred character of scriptural revelation. Spinoza’s task is more difficult than earlier conceptions of sacred revelation, because for Spinoza the sacred text and its sacrality do not originate in deity. Instead, Spinoza holds that the sacred is a human construction. The reader’s work is more difficult since Spinoza, like scripture itself, often refers to God as an agent being. Opportunities for confusion abound unless one recognizes that, in Spinoza’s thought, scripture is the self-image of humanity, depicted as holding a subordinate place in a relationship with a sovereign deity. For half a millennium philosophers and theologians had wrestled with the relation of the faculties of will, memory, and reason, and the workings of the active and passive intellects, anatomizing knowledge and action in a bewildering array of permutations. Many of these analyses had as their fixed components the subjectivity of the perceptual faculties and the material objectivity of the external world. This normative baseline for understanding was held in place for so long by an overarching conception of God as supreme knower, active intellect, prime mover, or spirit embodied by and diffused through the work of the church. Only rarely, and then with strict qualifications, did one claim for the individual faculties the autonomy to set their own terms for defining the real and the true. And even in those cases, the final object of knowledge was God. Francis Bacon broke the Scholastic mold in 1620, inaugurating a philosophical method distinct in principles and ends from the dominant theological systems, and instituting a program for a new style of inquiry. Addressing the conditions for knowledge and doing so without circularity (avoiding, that is, the question of how one knows how to know) became the constitutive task of philosophers through the end of the Enlightenment period. In one respect the philosophers’ work became easier: supernatural revelation was no longer a factor to be accounted for in determining what could be known. On the other hand, the specter of relativism – the prospect of all contingent things lacking an absolute ground for their existence – stopped many, especially the moral theorists, in their tracks. The Jewish philosophical tradition was not a direct beneficiary of the Baconian revolution but unquestionably gained from it derivatively. Church-

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mediated Aristotelianism held no sway over Jewish thinkers except as a principle for excluding alternate modes of thought. The secularization of discourse lifted at least the barrier against non-confessional programs of thought, while at the same time imposing a new barrier against non-empirical sources of knowledge. From the standpoint of a Christian culture, secularism meant de-Christianization. From a Jewish perspective the transformation was still exclusionary, as were most of the social institutions promoting the change. Holding open the question of the basis of knowledge, notwithstanding the preference for the empirical, gave Spinoza’s philosophy a thorough workout. The Treatise on Improving the Understanding (completed in 1661 and published posthumously) is Spinozan to the last detail. Stylistically spare and as lucid – and as demanding – as a mathematical essay, the Treatise serves as a commentary to Spinoza’s other work, particularly the Ethics, as well as a contribution to the common enterprise of constructing a deductive model for knowledge. The Treatise is not an essay in epistemology so much as it is a formula for a life devoted to the highest good.38 The term summum bonum alone is sufficient to indicate that satisfaction is gained by contemplation of essence, that is to say, a goodness transcending all other good (or perceived to be good) individual things.39 For Spinoza, subjective certainty consists in holding an ‘adequate idea’: that is, an idea corresponding to an objective thing.40 The role of the imagination is a noteworthy feature of the Treatise, and an aspect of Spinoza’s work which will find echoes and affinities in later writers. The capacity to produce hypotheses generates ideas that may be fictitious, their falsehood later to be recognized by the mind (but often firmly clung to before then). A true hypothesis is likewise vindicated by prolonged reflection; conceived clearly and distinctly, they exist in both the imagination and (unlike fictions) the understanding.41 Certainty of things, both those created and those uncreated, rests in the correspondence of ideas with their referents and – most importantly – in the clear distinction between contingent (created) and absolute (uncaused). Hence the idea of perfection, or of the summum bonum which persons seek, must be of an absolute, uncreated, eternal thing and not the sum total of all contingent perfections or good things.42 Spinoza’s Jewishness, as we have seen, was ambivalent, and it would not be exact to state that his work marks the entry of confessional Judaic thought into the philosophical mainstream. The issue of an identifiably Jewish form of understanding is one that arises after Emancipation and the emergence of the Reform movement, the operative question being whether there is a distinctive worldview able to ensure the particularity of the people during a time when all identities appear to be fungible. Likewise, as has also been mentioned, Spinoza’s epistemology privileges intuitive understanding, and does so to a degree that defies conventional definitions of rationalism. Rational he certainly was, but his was an inclusive

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rationalism rather than the type that excluded on principle any knowledge not derived from sense experience.43 Nuanced gradations of knowledge such as one finds in Spinoza may either display a virtuous subtlety or conceal an apologetic agenda. And nothing in his work suggests that he was in any way guided by the latter. THE SPINOZAN LEGACY The remote Baltic city of Königsberg was an unlikely place to begin a revolution, and the still more remote harbor town of Riga hardly merited even the term ‘provincial.’ Yet the 1781 publication in Riga of a Königsberg philosopher’s first major book inaugurated an epoch in the history of Western thought unequal to any since the rediscovery of Aristotle in the twelfth century. The philosopher, of course, was Immanuel Kant (1724–1804), and the book was the Critique of Pure Reason. As to the impact of his work, Whitehead’s comment about Plato comes to mind – though it is much less of an exaggeration to say that modern philosophy is a series of footnotes to Kant.44 Epochal as it was, the change in outlook wrought by Kant’s critical works was several decades in coming. Obviously any student of Kant’s thought must take account of his work from before the publication of the three great Critiques, and recognize that, however provincial his life may have been, he was deeply engaged in the questions of his age. More importantly for our topic are the facts that a critical philosophy of sorts was already well underway, and that Spinozism was part of the discourse.45 This is not the place for an account of Kant’s thought, yet the way in which it is pivotal for the history of philosophy requires at least a comment. Kant completed the break with medieval Scholasticism that Descartes initiated; his work is ‘critical’ in the sense that Descartes’s is ‘skeptical’: both apply their sharpest scrutiny to the foundations of understanding itself, seeking without circularity to know how knowledge is possible. For Kant, knowledge is the product of a process of synthesis, literally the combining of sense impressions with ideas, and hence a creative effort in its own right. Alongside the impulse toward rational rigor in discourse came a heightened awareness of the value of the non-rational; and the Age of Reason was also epochal for serious thought about those things that can only be felt. Aesthetics, which in earlier philosophy denoted doctrines of sense perception, began to take on its modern reference to judgments about experience.46 This was more than a revival of classical ideas about the sublime, although some of those early thinkers drew new attention.47 In the half century after the publication of Kant’s First Critique, the human will became concretized in a new philosophical movement. Less a rehabilitation of classical doctrines of the will than the construction of a component in a new philosophical anthropology, the will began to be defined

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in the nineteenth century as the locus of human freedom, liberated both from classical determinism and Christian doctrines of original sin. Acknowledging his debt to ‘the great Kant,’ Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860) radicalized the will in developing an epistemology favoring the subjective. ‘The whole world of objects,’ writes Schopenhauer, ‘is and remains representation, and is for this reason wholly and for ever conditioned by the subject; in other words, it has transcendental ideality.’48 Similarities between Kantian thought and the metaphysics of Plato are, in Schopenhauer’s view, intentional: If Kant’s teaching, and, since Kant’s time, that of Plato, had ever been properly understood and grasped; if men had truly and earnestly reflected on the inner meaning and content of the teachings of these two great masters, instead of lavishly using the technical expressions of the one and parodying the style of the other, they could not have failed long ago to discover how much the two great sages agree, and that the true significance, the aim, of both teachings is absolutely the same.49 This does not mean that the material world is an illusion; only that it is known as a representation: that is, as something presented to each individual. The will, in Schopenhauer’s delineation, is present in every phenomenon.50 Any interpretation of nineteenth-century thought would be incomplete without some account of the work of Friedrich Schelling (1775–1854), who ranked next to Hegel at the time yet is now not much more than a name cursorily encountered. His present-day obscurity masks his influence over a broad spectrum of figures, artists as well as philosophers because of the role Schelling’s early ideas played in shaping Romanticism.51 Schelling’s influence extended across the cultural spectrum and endured longer than that of most of his contemporaries. His 1809 essay Philosophical Inquiries into the Nature of Human Freedom is arguably his most substantial contribution to a question central for philosophers and theologians alike. Schelling’s most notable advance in the discourse of freedom was his locating it within consciousness: that is, he does not try to demonstrate it metaphysically so much as he asserts it as something given in self-consciousness.52 Freedom for Schelling is an explanatory principle in a life directed toward action rather than contemplation. By the first quarter of the nineteenth century the European philosophical world had undergone a transformation as profound as the religious revolution in the sixteenth century. Whether we take the long view and trace the trajectory of early modern philosophy from the first half of the seventeenth century to the early nineteenth, or the shorter view of the Kantian revolution in thought in the final decades of the eighteenth century, it is obvious that Jews were rare participants and the religion of Judaism almost entirely invisible. Hence it is not surprising that the Jewish discourse of exile and restoration appears absent from this part of the history of ideas. The early modern trans-

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formation in philosophy will help shape the course of Jewish thought, especially concerning those perennial questions of dislocation and rest, in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

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Notes 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

11 12 13

14 15

16 17

Gershom Scholem, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism (New York: Schocken, 1995) 7. Gershom Scholem, Kabbalah (New York: Meridien, 1978) 96–116. A complete translation of the classic is The Zohar, tr. Harry Sperling and Maurice Simon, 5 vols. (London: Soncino, 1933). Moshe Idel, Kabbalah: New Perspectives (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988) 119. Moshe Idel’s discussion of devekut (Kabbalah, 35–58) is an eloquent case in point. Yitzhak Baer, A History of the Jews in Christian Spain, tr. Louis Schoffman (Philadelphia: JPS, 1992), vol. 1, 306–78. For a contemporary record, see The Jew in the Medieval World, ed. Jacob R. Marcus (New York: Atheneum, 1981) 51–55 Heinrich Graetz, History of the Jews, vol. 3 (Philadelphia: JPS, 1941) 187–296; Paloma Días Más, The Sephardim: The Jews from Spain (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992). Norman A. Stillman, ‘Aspects of Jewish Life in Islamic Spain,’ in Aspects of Jewish Culture in the Middle Ages, ed. Paul E. Szarmach (Albany: SUNY Press, 1979) 51–84. Robert Chazan, ‘Representation of Events in the Middle Ages,’ H&T 27, Beiheft 27 (1988) 40–55. Marcus, p. 51; Shalom Rosenberg, ‘Exile and Redemption in Jewish Thought in the Sixteenth Century: Contending Conceptions,’ in Jewish Thought in the Sixteenth Century, ed. Bernard Dov Cooperman (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983) 399–430. Stephen Sharot, ‘Jewish Millenarianism: A Comparison of Medieval Communities,’ Comparative Studies in Society and History 22 (1980) 394–415. Joseph Klausner, The Messianic Idea in Israel, from Its Beginning to the Completion of the Mishnah (New York: Macmillan, 1955); Gershom Scholem, The Messianic Idea in Judaism and Other Essays on Jewish Spirituality (New York: Schocken, 1971). Affirmation of sovereign benevolence, while obviously at the core of medieval piety, could be expressed as experience or as expectation, and here is one of the great dilemmas of medieval Jewish thought. Is divine benevolence something to be affirmed as actually present amid contrary experience, or something to be hoped for (or proleptically ‘known’) as an eventual reality? Both aspects are present in the medieval tradition, the former being exemplified in the Kabbalistic strains, the latter being found among the Messianists, though these categories overlap too much for explanatory clarity. Only with the modern division into aggadic and halakhic modes is this dilemma resolved. R. J. Zwi Werblowsky, ‘The Safed Revival and Its Aftermath,’ JS 2, 7–33; Yoram BarGal, ‘The Subjective Significance of the Landscape of Tsfat,’ Folklore 95 (1984) 245–50. The standard modern treatment is Gershom Scholem, Sabbatai Sevi: The Mystical Messiah, 1626–1676, tr. R. J. Z. Werblowsky (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976), now augmented by David J. Halperin, Sabbatai Zevi: Testimonies to a Fallen Messiah (Oxford: LLJC, 2007); for others, see Bruce Rosenstock, ‘Abraham Miguel Cardoso’s Messianism: A Reappraisal,’ AJSR 23 (1998) 63–104. The most thorough biography of the Maharal is Byron L. Sherwin, Mystical Theology and Social Dissent: The Life and Works of Judah Loew of Prague (Oxford: LLJC, 1983). On the construction and transmission of the Golem legend see Hillel J. Kieval, ‘Pursuing the Golem of Prague: Jewish Culture and the Invention of a Tradition,’ MJ 17 (1997) 1–23.

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18 Salo Wittmayer Baron, A Social and Religious History of the Jews, 2nd edn., vol. 13 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1969) 64–158. 19 Richard H. Popkin, ‘The Jewish Community of Amsterdam,’ in HJP 600–11. 20 The writ is available in JMW, 57; on its meaning and implications see Steven Nadler, Spinoza’s Heresy: Immortality and the Jewish Mind (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), and Richard H. Popkin, ‘Spinoza’s Excommunication,’ in Jewish Themes in Spinoza’s Philosophy, ed. Heidi M. Ravven and Lenn E. Goodman (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002) 263–79. 21 Isaac Husik, A History of Medieval Jewish Philosophy (Mineola, NY: Dover, 2002) xiii–l; Collete Sirat, A History of Jewish Philosophy in the Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985) 141–55; Alexander Broadie, ‘The Nature of Medieval Jewish Philosophy,’ in HJP 83–92. 22 A view, once virtually heretical in itself, now becoming more readily acknowledged; see e.g., Edward Feld, ‘Spinoza the Jew,’ MJ 9 (1989) 101–19 23 Seymour Feldman, ‘Spinoza,’ HJP, 618. 24 Margaret D. Wilson, ‘Infinite Understanding, Scientia Intuitiva, and Ethics I.16,’ Midwest Studies in Philosophy VIII (1983) 181–91; reprinted in Margaret Dauler Wilson, Ideas and Mechanism: Essays on Early Modern Philosophy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999) 166–77. 25 Harry Austryn Wolfson, The Philosophy of Spinoza (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1934) vii. 26 David E. Roberts, Existentialism and Religious Belief (London: Oxford University Press, 1957) 15–60. 27 E3pref ; for analysis see Bennett, 36–38. 28 E2p43; see Margaret Wilson, ‘Spinoza’s Theory of Knowledge,’ in The Cambridge Companion to Spinoza, ed. Don Garrett (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996) 96–98. 29 E2p40, schol. 2. 30 5p13; 5p14, p24. 31 5p40, note. 32 5p.36. 33 94p37schol. 34 Hasidism is the most obvious instance: see Seth Brody, ‘“Open to Me the Gates of Righteousness”: The Pursuit of Holiness and Non-Duality in Early Hasidic Teaching,’ JQR n.s. 89 (1998) 3–44; also Rivka Schatz Uffenheimer, Hasidism as Mysticism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993). 35 Norman O. Brown, ‘Philosophy and Prophecy: Spinoza’s Hermeneutics,’ Political Theory 14 (1986) 195–213. 36 On the publication and reception of the TTP see Jonathan I. Israel, Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity 1650–1750 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001) 275–94. 37 On Spinoza’s influence on the Radical Enlightenment and the reception of the TTP, see Adam Sutcliffe, Judaism and Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003) 118–24, 133–47. 38 The commentary of Harold H. Joachim, Spinoza’s Tractatus de intellectus emendatione (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1940) remains essential reading, despite its absence of phenomenological perspective. 39 Spinoza, Tractatus de intellectus emendatione, ed. Wolfgang Bartuschat (SW 5.1) § 4 (p. 8); §§ 25–31 (pp. 24–28). 40 It is worth keeping in mind that ‘adequate’ as used in this treatise (§ 35 and elsewhere) implies correspondence (ad+aequalis) with the thing ideated. 41 Tractatus, §§ 58–63 (pp. 50–56). 42 Tractatus, §§ 108–10 (pp. 94–98). 43 The relation of intuition and reason in the Treatise and the Ethics is elucidated by Spencer Carr, ‘Spinoza’s Distinction between Rational and Intuitive Knowledge,’ PR 87 (1978) 241–52.

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44 Or, in Rudolf Malter’s words, ‘The history of German philosophy is also the history of the effects of the Critique of Pure Reason’ (‘Main Currents in the German Interpretation of the Critique of Pure Reason since the Beginning of Neo-Kantianism,’ JHI 42 [1981] 531). 45 Geogre Di Giovanni, ‘The first twenty years of critique: The Spinoza connection,’ in The Cambridge Companion to Kant, ed. Paul Guyer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992) 417–48; Johan van der Zande, ‘In the Image of Cicero: German Philosophy between Wolff and Kant,’ JHI 56 (1995) 419–42. 46 Ted Kinnaman, ‘Aesthetics before Kant,’ CEMP 572–85. 47 See Samuel H. Monk, The Sublime: A Study of Critical Theories in EighteenthCentury England (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1960); Allan Megill, ‘Aesthetic Theory and Historical Consciousness in the Eighteenth Century,’ H&T 17 (1978) 29–62; Lynn Poland, ‘The Idea of the Holy and the History of the Sublime,’ JR 72 (1992) 175–97; James Kirwan, Sublimity: The Non-Rational and the Irrational in the History of Aesthetics (New York: Routledge, 2005) 85–102. 48 Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, tr. E. J. F. Payne, 2 vols. (New York: Dover, 1966), vol. 1, §5, p. 15. For interpretation, see Rudolf Malter, ‘Schopenhauers Transzendentalismus,’ Midwest Studies in Philosophy VIII (1983) 433–55. 49 World as Will and Representation, vol. 1, §31, p. 173. 50 World as Will and Representation, vol. 1, §28, esp. p. 155. 51 Schelling’s aesthetic was provocatively labeled ‘enthusiasm’ by E. D. Hirsch, Wordsworth and Schelling: A Typological Study of Romanticism (Yale Studies in English, 145; New Haven: Yale University Press, 1960). For further context see Marshall Brown, The Shape of German Romanticism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1979) and Terry Pinkard, German Philosophy 1760–1860: The Legacy of Idealism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002) 172–98. 52 See James Gutmann’s interpretive introduction to F. W. J. Schelling, Philosophical Inquiries into the Nature of Human Freedom, tr. James Gutmann (LaSalle, IL: Open Court, 1992) xxxvii.

Chapter 4

MODERNITY

AN ENLIGHTENMENT OF ONE’S OWN Nothing is more misleading that the almost universal assumption that Haskalah means Enlightenment and that the Jewish movement of that name is part and parcel of the broader Enlightenment in Europe.1 Contemporaneous they were, to be sure, and equally grounded in the idea of progress; but mainstream and margin remained distinct. The root (s-kl) from which haskalah derives denotes prudence rather than light, more suggestive of refined understanding than of emergence from superstitious darkness,2 and most suggestive of a variegated process of adaptation. There was, to be sure, an anti-religious element of the Haskalah corresponding to the more anticlerical aspects of the Enlightenment.3 But just as importantly, Haskalah set the stage for several movements of religious renewal. To avoid circularity in our exposition, we should point out that the forms of Enlightenment-era renewal within Judaism hinged upon differing conceptions of the religious component of experience. Before emancipation, drawing boundaries between cultural and religious identities would have been bizarre if not impossible, and this was true in Christendom as well. Hence definitions of religion were necessarily preliminary to any attempts to reform piety. For obvious reasons, Diaspora is more easily defined as a historical category than as a condition of religious experience. Exile, when viewed from the historical perspective, may be understood in material terms: economic prosperity, or lack thereof; cultural autonomy or its absence; and political measures intended to tolerate or marginalize the minority population come readily to mind. As a determining factor for piety, on the other hand, external conditions might not operate quite so straightforwardly. While the cultural milieu is never irrelevant in understanding the condition of Diaspora, seemingly benevolent conditions may be the occasion for increased apprehensiveness, while intensified harshness may stimulate new hope in a redemptive end, as we saw in the exiled Sephardic community in Safed. And the hardening of Pharaoh’s heart (Ex. 10:1), in whatever later manifestations it was thought to recur, is traditionally seen as a foreshadowing of divine intervention on behalf of a persecuted Jewry.

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If adversity is a combination of good news and bad, so is prosperity, for (as the Prophetic corpus tends so often to emphasize) the risk to the spirit is greatest when the temptation to complacency is strong. During the era of emancipation of European Jewry, re-entrenchment vied with assimilation as the preferable response.4 Holding the tension was the static nature of the Diaspora on the one hand, in which alienation is seen as a continuous state of disorder, and the progressive view of secular history on the other, by which an inequitable social order might be gradually rectified. As a concept, alienation had for so long been domesticated in Jewish thought that it is not surprising that its emergence in secular political discourse was due to writers of Jewish origin.5 The harsh but inescapable fact was that Jewish collective memory held a tension between a normative state in an autonomous homeland and a deviant condition that was all that the living culture was familiar with.6 Moses Mendelssohn (1729–96), whom we encountered in the Introduction, was an energetic participant in the philosophical dialogue of the late eighteenth century, and was one of the guardians of Spinoza’s legacy to the broader discourse. For example, he detected an unacknowledged Spinozan influence in Leibniz’s doctrine of pre-established harmony and argued that Spinoza’s coordination of concepts and things is compatible with Leibniz’s concept of the divine mind.7 ‘Neophil,’ the advocate for Spinozism in Mendelssohn’s 1755 Dialogues (published anonymously), argues that Spinoza was instrumental in the development of the German philosophy of the eighteenth century.8 Mendelssohn’s favor is no idle panegyric: his own thought is a substantial contribution to Enlightenment discourse on aesthetics, and he effectively channels Spinoza’s insights into the German tradition. The text for which Mendelssohn is best known, Jerusalem (1783), is a brief but powerful book, a commentary on Judaism and civil society in the Germany of his time, that being an era in which the political and religious realms were being newly defined. Mendelssohn is careful to advocate for the same measure of religious freedom that was being granted to the Christian confessions, but he also argues impressively that Judaism is essentially different from the various Christian traditions. Whereas the churches have possessed the power to compel observance, Judaism has not been regulated by an institutional authority since the days of the Temple; its piety is found in eternal truths voluntarily embraced.9 And they are embraced not from fear of retribution but from a sense that the eternal will is for all persons to be happy, an end providentially made available to all.10 Thus in Mendelssohn’s view the truths of religion, and not just those of Judaism, are means for attaining felicity.11 The symbol evoked by the title is to be understood ironically: Jerusalem is no longer the city to be lamented; rather, it is that state of contentment in which one realizes the fulfillment of the divine will.12 Like Spinoza, Mendelssohn cannot be said to represent the tradition in his day. In a later generation, Salomon Ludwig Steinheim (1789–1866), a physician keenly attuned to the rise of liberal Protestant dogmatics, crafted a doctrine of

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revelation that steers a course between the subjectivity of German Romantic Gefühl and the demand for uncritical devotion espoused by traditionalists.13 In four massive volumes composed during his moments away from his medical practice, Steinheim’s work capitalizes on a concept seldom exploited at the time: authority. The term was of course in the general vocabulary, sometimes used interchangeably with ‘power’ to designate levels of social control, but as a hermeneutical concept it had not been used with the force Steinheim gives it. For Steinheim, counter to Spinoza and Schleiermacher alike, the source of revelation is not subjective feeling but the divine revealer, and the content of revelation must be something that the human imagination cannot invent.14 Revelation, for Steinheim, is distinguished from ‘non-revelation’ by being recognized as ‘a mental object that is communicated from outside.’15 Steinheim clearly recognizes what was implicit in Second Temple Judaism and what would only become explicit in the twentieth century: namely, that the hermeneutic community determines not only the content, but the distinctive quality, of sacred revelation. It is the task of theologians, in Steinheim’s view, to resist the alluring arguments of the philosophers and affirm the objective character of scriptural revelation. In an obvious critique of the liberal theology of his day, Steinheim sees the opening words of Genesis as a protest against each and every form of a priori thinking and ‘feeling-religion’ (Gefühlsreligion), which he sees as deterministic. ‘Only in the religion of divine revelation do we receive our consciousness of freedom, this inalienable inner feeling that we must stand as accountable agents of our actions.’16 Clearly and distinctly, then (to use the favorite terms of that era), we discern the emergence of a philosophical anthropology in which intuition and imagination play new and substantial roles in the work of understanding. Whether this is attributable to the exhaustion of empiricism or the ‘Copernican turn’ that Kant’s thought represents – and it is likely a combination since they were cause and effect – the reference point for inquiry in the nineteenth century was not just subjectivity, but intentionality. For Jewish thought the Romantic era would yield changes as profound as those that Christianity underwent during the Reformation. The change that took place in the nineteenth century was in Jewish stances toward the tradition, rather than in rejection or retrieval of it. As is commonly recognized, learning has been considered a form of piety within the Jewish tradition. It is equally obvious that the material studied was limited to the canonical corpus of Jewish law and narrative, a restriction both intrinsic to the pious nature of such activity and conditioned by the isolation of most Jewish communities from the Christian mainstream. From the functional perspective, let us remember, preserving the texts of the tradition was tantamount to retaining its practices, and served as both a reminder of the normative state and an incentive to hope for its ultimate restoration. The ideal of pious study within this tradition flourished when a cyclical conception of history was dominant. The idea of progress called for a new rationale for learning and a new conception of its place within the Jewish tradition.17

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Patterned after classical philology in its comprehensive sense, the field of Research in Judaism (Wissenschaft des Judentums) was an indirect beneficiary of the secularization of learning in European, especially German, universities. Freed from theological constraints, scholars of classical antiquity combined linguistic, archaeological, and historical expertise, and all their ancillary subspecializations, to construct a deliberately rigorous science of antiquity, or Altertumswissenschaft.18 Claims of critical objectivity were bolstered by two assumptions: the positivistic nature of the scientific pursuit in textual criticism and reconstruction of events, and the deliberate distancing of the modern researcher’s perspective in questions of similarity and difference between antiquity and modernity. The second of these assumptions is patently bogus, as Greece and Rome were idealized in the nineteenth century as never before. But implicit in that veneration of the past (which after all justified the prominence of classical study in schools) was an acknowledgment of discontinuity and the sense that European modernity was at best dialectically related to pagan antiquity. Not so with the scholarly study of Judaism: Wissenschaft des Judentums was methodologically a clone of Altertumswissenschaft but rested on different cultural assumptions.19 The first of these was consensus on continuity between antiquity and pre-modernity, that extension of medieval Jewish culture that lasted into the eighteenth century and beyond in some locales. The second was that Jewish culture, to the extent that Jewry was being demarginalized, was collectively committed to the idea of progress and under an obligation to modernize, especially in the area of religious practice. At the risk of triteness, we may call the emergence of the new approach to Jewish culture the discovery of history and a rediscovery on the part of Judaism of its own past.20 Such a rediscovery engenders a dialectical relationship of its own, with the ‘self’ of modern Judaism in tension with a past which is no one else’s yet disengaged from the present. The intricacies of that dynamic need not concern us, but an interesting question does emerge: is the modern idea of progress the friend or foe of Jewish piety? It was a ‘Western’ concept, to be sure, yet not a uniquely Christian one, so the answer to the question depended on whether European Judaism considered itself an integral component of Western modernity or a separate culture adhering to its own doctrine of history. Compounding the difficulty of the choice was the potency, during that Hegelian era, of historicism: the doctrine that inexorable laws governed human conduct and the rise and fall of civilizations.21 Under the weight of universal historical laws, resistance to the idea of progress became virtually tantamount to a rejection of scientific truth.22 On the other hand, capitulating to historical determinism, it must be noted, is not only a rejection of forebears’ folkways; it more importantly strikes at the core dogma of human freedom, established in Torah and sustained throughout the tradition even (or perhaps especially) when the people were otherwise in servitude.

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RESISTANCE Liberal initiatives in religion seldom arrive without controversy; the rhetoric of apostasy usually accompanies it. Thus Samson Raphael Hirsch delivered, as a sermon, a funeral oration for the ancestral practices and beliefs of the Jews, and later spearheaded an effort to secede from the larger Jewish community.23 Hirsch was a founder of Orthodoxy, a role that sounds peculiar to anyone who may have assumed that that was the trunk of which Reform was the branch. The norm of traditional observance and pious study was indeed the basis from which progressive Judaism emerged; but before the nineteenth century this culture was sufficiently isolated to permit no other option. Determined adherence to those norms was the ideal of Orthodoxy, and in Hirsch we find an interpreter of Torah for whom the narrative of Egyptian bondage remains alive and, in a word, binding.24 Consciousness of exile and the importance of continuity went hand in hand. External conditions may of course have contributed to the prestige held by the religious leaders in the remote Ashkenazi communities. Known by the Yiddish term shtetl, a diminutive for the word for city, Jewish villages in Eastern Europe were culturally and linguistically isolated from the Slavic Christians whose soil they occupied.25 Generally smaller and more vulnerable to the vicissitudes of their host nations, these groups tended to lack the means to create the stable infrastructure necessary for an educated religious and professional stratum. Learning, always valued as a functional substitute for sacrifices, held a scarcity value that invested shtetl rabbis with an authority seldom found in the bourgeois synagogues of the commercial cities. Concentrations of religious power, even though deliberately restrained from messianic pretensions, sanctioned levels of enthusiasm that were alternately admired and emulated. Dynasties of charismatic leaders became central to Hasidism, for example; and as individuals these rebbes acquired legendary reputations for kindness and sanctity. (Rebbe is an intentional variant of ‘rabbi’ and indicates hereditary descent from one of the early Hasidic masters.) Their counterparts among the Orthodox establishment, long-standing antagonists to Hasidism, drew their authority from their learning and their ability to work with the subtleties of the Talmudic corpus in ways that gave them unique standing in their communities as well.26 Both Orthodox and Hasidic, the leaders of shtetl Jewry were considered paragons of piety among their congregants, and in part they were idealized for being very different from the elite outside the shtetl: that is, in mainstream Christendom. Where gentile culture seemed to lionize the rich, the pious Jew’s otherworldliness was shown in the meagerness of worldly goods. When the landed gentry found its greatest amusement in hunting, the shtetl displayed its values in forming study groups. Naturally some of the difference was socially conditioned: residents of the shtetls simply did not have as many of the resources or privileges as their Christian neighbors. But over time a

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counter-culture becomes the normative pattern in its own right; and Eastern European Jewry was no exception. The cultural differences between shtetl and metropolitan milieus are important for our subject. In other surveys the conventional demarcations between Sephardic and Ashkenazic, and between Orthodox, Conservative, and Reform branches within those traditions necessarily retain their claims to greatest explanatory value. For the present purposes, however, origins and affiliations do not tell the complete story, while urbanization and isolation, with their corresponding attitudes to secular modernity, are salient factors in evaluating Jewish philosophical trends in during the era of emancipation. Hasidism may be an unlikely icon of encounter with modernity, but in point of fact it was from the start a movement of religious renewal. A medieval form of Hasidism, reinvigorating ritual and purity practices, had taken form in the Rhineland and in Austria.27 Crystallized in the Book of the Pious, the Ashkenazi Hasidim held that divine revelation is not confined to what was communicated to Moses on Sinai but rather extends through the course of human history and experience: that is, the will of God continues to communicate specific expectations to believers.28 Here as elsewhere, much is revealed in a single word, for the lexical root h-s-d from which ‘hasidism’ derives connotes benevolence, divine favor in particular.29 Medieval Ashkenaz was a culture in which change seemed to be the only constant. Protected (at least partially) by royal privileges yet barred by the church from certain commercial activities, Northern European Jews never enjoyed the autonomy, much less the prosperity, of their Iberian counterparts. Crusades and the plague created a perfect storm for the Jewish communities under Christian rule. Between 1290 (England) and 1394 (France) most of the Jewish populations of Northern Europe had been driven out of their all-too-temporary interim homelands and had resettled in the South (Italy) and East (Poland and Lithuania).30 Amidst the dislocation arose an oral tradition that recaptured penitential motifs from the early Diaspora. The Sefer Hasidim, or Book of the Pious, is one of the few texts surviving from this era, a product of a twelfth and thirteenth-century movement known as Ashkenazi Hasidism.31 Hasidism as generally recognized originates in the eighteenth century as a movement independent of its medieval predecessor. It originated in southern Poland in the 1730s with the work of one Israel ben Eliezer, known after 1735 as the Baal Shem Tov (‘Besht’ for short), who integrated the medieval kabbalism of the Zohar with a contemplative piety that saw divinity virtually ubiquitous in material experience.32 A revival of affective spirituality (comparable to Christian parallels in Pietism and Methodism) against the backdrop of a seemingly static and rigorous culture of Torah and Talmud, early Hasidism was ostracized by the Jewish rabbinical establishment and became a sectarian undercurrent of a marginalized population: in other words, a spinoff from an outsider group. There is little use in drawing out any comparative conclusions from these examples; all we see for certain is how different these communities can be. As

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with all religious communities in modernity, the competing demands of orthodoxy and internal harmony provoked the most excruciating examples of collective soul-searching. And when, as in much of modern Jewish history, the divisions within are overshadowed by more substantive threats from without, the most urgent question is dependence on divine favor or the aid of fellow Jews. Just as exile took many forms, so can deliverance from exile be depicted in a variety of ways. The range of interpretations of exile in the middle ages amply indicates that the quest for understanding a community’s given state at a specific time was in itself a pursuit alongside the hope for geopolitical restoration. Yet such understanding, no matter how necessary, remained elusive in the absence of any centralized teaching authority. ESSENCES One effect of the trend toward the liberal conceptualizations of religion was a series of attempts to define the constitutive property or essence of particular traditions. These naturally followed confessional lines and tended to take on apologetic overtones. The most prominent example, its prominence resting largely on its author’s academic eminence, was The Essence of Christianity by Adolf von Harnack (1851–1930). Harnack (the ‘von’ was bestowed on him as a form of knighthood), the leading church historian of his time and a Lutheran of the liberal school, identified Christianity with the quality of mercy, as exemplified in the person of Jesus: thus piety and practice are directed toward the imperfect human condition.33 From Jewish authors, also predominantly in the liberal vanguard, there arose a number of essays defining ‘essential’ Judaism, and while some were appreciative, others wrote in deliberate opposition to Harnack’s Essence.34 The most eloquent response to Harnack came from the pen of Leo Baeck (1873–1956), who undertook to demonstrate that Christianity cannot be understood apart from its Judaic origins.35 For Baeck, the ‘essence’ of Judaism is found in practice rather than in dogma, the practice being driven by a collective (though hardly homogeneous) impulse to seek truth by engaging canonical revelation, both written and oral.36 ‘The characteristic feature of Judaism,’ says Baeck, ‘is thus the relation of man to God. Essential to it is the consciousness of being created.’37 Createdness he depicts as both participation in the divine creativity and subordination to it, since humans receive in revelation a mandate that is infinite in scope and thus impossible for them, being finite, to fulfill.38 However literally one might read the Genesis account, creation in Judaism is never reduced to metaphorical status as a practical axiom whereby one is to live as if created by an omnipotent deity. Within the religious tradition it is a given that the biblical God exists; that the people Israel is bound in a unique way to this deity; and that the relationship is mediated by revelation.

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Profound differences arose over the definition of revelation and the way in which it mediated God and Israel. These fissures have antecedents in antiquity, and the main points of difference have already been indicated. Pertinent at this point is the eighteenth-century division between Rabbinic and Hasidic perspectives, the gulf between legalism and mysticism that endured into the twentieth century. This distinction offers more explanatory utility for interpreting lines of thought than the more conventional division of branches of contemporary Judaism.39 Edmund Husserl, mentioned already in the Introduction, was as much a philosophical founder as Kant, though his influence has been less extensive. Jewish in family background but not in faith, Husserl was first a philosopher of mathematics in the Kantian line that worked through Heinrich Rickert, later influenced very strongly by Franz Brentano, one of the founders of psychology and the author of the two-volume Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint, in which the concept of intentionality is fully articulated in modern form. (Brentano, an erudite Aristotelian and for a while a Catholic priest, credits medieval Scholasticism with originating the concept.40) For Husserl, intentionality is the necessary ground of experience, defined in turn as consciousness (Bewußtsein) of a thing.41 Consciousness has a technical meaning here, as does intentionality: both reflect a psychological orientation in place of the traditional epistemology which philosophers had been using, with variations, since Aristotle. Husserl’s thought is revolutionary in several ways, most notably in the distinction between ‘natural’ and ‘phenomenological’ modes of understanding. In the former, sense-perception in correspondence with the material realm constitutes the known reality, and understanding is premised on the accuracy of the perception and the objective knowability of what is called the ‘real world.’ While such a stance appears to assure certainty, in point of fact each object of naturalistic knowledge is conditioned by subjective presuppositions: what we think we know has been influenced by prior assumptions. Phenomenological understanding, by contrast, strives to be rigorously ‘presuppositionless’ by means of what Husserl calls a ‘phenomenological reduction.’42 This reduction is not conditioned but rather transcendental: in Husserl’s terms, pure consciousness of absolute Being.43 In Husserl’s work, consciousness of any given thing calls for discerning its meaning as an ‘intentional object.’44 Such an object does not simply strike the senses, to be interpreted or misinterpreted by our reason; it has already been selected and grasped, grasping being an etymological connotation of percipere, the root of ‘perceive.’45 Interpreters of religion, in the nineteenth century guided predominately by philological methods when they were studying traditions other than their own, and by theological interests when working within their own confessional traditions, began to incorporate the new style of thought in the early decades of the twentieth century.46 Rudolf Otto (1869–1937), an authentic founder of academic religious studies, is best known for defining three characteristics of

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what he called ‘the Holy,’ that is, of what is counted as holy in a religious tradition. The defining qualities of anything holy, according to Otto, are that it be ‘mysterious,’ ‘tremendous,’ and ‘fascinating.’47 In contemporary terms that avoid the banal connotations of those adjectives, the holy in Otto’s conception is hidden, awe-inspiring, and entrancing. Many things may have one, even two, of those features; but only what is ‘holy’ possesses all three. Has the old wine of Platonic intuition been transferred to the new wineskins of Kantian epistemology? Not quite, although the similarities suggest such a connection. True, a yearning for something fixed and transcendent is implicit in the notion of intuition when used in this way; but the metaphysics of an ideal world is not entailed by post-critical concepts of intuition. Plato, we should recall, was combating a form of subjectivity potentially corrosive in the moral realm and (if the Republic is to be seen as his position) took the poets hostage in the contest. Husserl, on the other hand, seeks to purify not the realm of objects but the mental operations of the subject, and Otto in turn recognizes (as Husserl does not) that the subject’s perceptions are culturally conditioned to respond in certain ways to specific objects, particularly those deemed holy in the subject’s tradition. Only if, to use Husserlian language, the ‘natural standpoint’ is suspended, does the apprehension of the Holy become possible. The Kantian turn described earlier in the previous chapter was an unlikely but a durable revolution, for the world of thought has not been the same since Kant. His work ramified convolutedly: there was more post- and antiKantianism than straight-line extension of the philosopher’s work. The movement that set the critical philosophy at the foundation of modern thought was Neo-Kantianism, which took shape in two camps: one, centered in southwestern Germany at the universities of Freiburg and Heidelberg, and the other located in Marburg. The former school of Neo-Kantianism led in theorizing the relation, and potential unity, of all the sciences, natural and cultural. The Marburg school is associated with thinkers like Paul Natorp (1854–1924) and Hermann Cohen (1842–1918); held together by adherence to transcendental method as the common foundation of all inquiry, its approach, sometimes labeled ‘logistic,’ attributes indefinite progress to thought itself.48 Grounding all understanding in rational judgment, or Vernunft, is not an enterprise to be scorned, but in some applications it tends to invite scorn. Kant’s Religion within the Bounds of Mere Reason (1792) is a defense of Christianity minus supernatural revelation and dogma demanding any form of assent apart from moral conviction. This rendered scripture redundant, if not an obstacle, to genuine religion; and Kant himself suffered for his conviction by being prohibited from publishing any further works on religious matters. Advocating a ‘pure religion of reason,’ Kant could see no binding power in a demand imposed upon an individual; yet that was in his view the core of Judaism, exemplified in the divine command to Abraham – which Kant considered not just illegitimate but immoral.49

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Reconciling Judaism with anything approximating the Kantian ‘pure rational religion’ seems prima facie impossible. Jewish belief in revelation had been a principal target of earlier Deists, many of whom hoped that Christianity would collapse once the sacredness of Hebrew revelation had been compromised.50 While numerous Christian apologists early and eagerly undertook the task of demonstrating that reason and revelation were compatible, a Jewish natural theology was slow to take shape. Quite apart from the hermeneutical threat to Torah, the cultural identity of a covenantal people would be vulnerable in the wake of any attempt to universalize revelation.51 Enter Hermann Cohen, already established as an authoritative interpreter of Kant’s critical philosophy and a critic of Spinoza’s alleged pantheism.52 What Kant had done with Christianity in Religion within the Bounds, Cohen attempts with Judaism; and it was an attempt that needed to be made, for the sake of Kantianism if not for Judaism. Religion within did not argue for the supremacy of Christianity over other systems of conduct, only for its validity as a moral worldview. In order to vindicate Kant’s claim that moral reason is universal, and consolidated in more than one cultural form, another religious system had to be put to the test. This is what Cohen undertakes with Judaism. A non-Jew could have done the same, or Cohen could have subjected a different historical religion to his analysis; the fact of the matter is that this leading Kantian was also familiar, since childhood, with liberal Jewish piety. Religion of Reason out of the Sources of Judaism: the title itself is daunting, and in its original form it was misleading – through no fault of Cohen’s – because it began with the definite article.53 Cohen is not making a claim for Judaism as the religion of reason, indeed is not advocating for any particular faith, but rather is arguing that the moral wisdom essential to the rational conception of religion may be found within the canonical sources of the Jewish tradition.54 As such, Cohen’s book is more an exercise in the philosophy of religion than a constructive work of theology.55 Even more precisely, it is an early venture into the phenomenology of religion: Cohen implies as much by describing consciousness (Bewußtsein) as ‘only another expression for history.’56 Religion, for Cohen, occupies the realm of moral teachings; the ‘religion of reason’ he describes points to ‘one mankind, and in the same way to each individual man in his own uniqueness.’57 Cohen is not usually grouped with the opponents of the historical-critical method then looming so large over biblical studies, yet any invoking of the ‘sources of Judaism’ calls for a stance on the meaning of revelation. For Cohen, the experience of holiness is an anthropological given; ‘the holy spirit is fully as much the spirit of man as the spirit of God.’58 Likewise, the norm of action, mitzvah in Hebrew, expresses both divine command and human responsibility.59 God is unique and identified with creativity, and humanity is its correlate, the human spirit being as eternal as the divine.60 ‘Redemption is liberation from sin.’61 Given Cohen’s identification of religion with morality, and the emphasis he places on atonement in Judaism, it could hardly be anything else. Although Cohen does not use the term

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alienation, in describing sin he addresses the sense of isolation that comes with an individual’s consciousness of being an ‘I.’ ‘The sin before God leads us to man as I. The sin before God leads us to the redemption by God. The redemption by God leads us in the last instance to the reconciliation of the I with God. It is only the reconciliation with God which brings the individual to his maturity as the I.’62 Cohen does not sound very Kantian here, but his overall work stands solidly in the tradition, and passages like these will be echoed by Jewish thinkers for the remainder of the century. INTO EXISTENTIALISM Of course it is not only the overpoweringly sacred that comes into view once the natural standpoint has been bracketed; feelings hitherto amorphous and ambiguous come into the focus of reflexive consciousness. At times when identity becomes so fluid that an individual may find confusion rather than meaning in the various social, political, or religious constructions of who he or she is, the certainties that had been guaranteed with modernity do more to alienate than to orient the subject. Such disorientation amidst political, economic and scientific revolutions brought forward the iconoclastic nihilism of Nietzsche and the God-intoxicated anxiety of Kierkegaard. Alienation and despair entered Continental thought through the work of Søren Kierkegaard (1813–55), who knew whereof he wrote. Anti-Idealist to the core, Kierkegaard saw the cultural absorption of Christianity as its negation: the more institutional the church became, the less it represented the original spirit of Christian existence. Genuine Christianity, as opposed to the ‘Christendom’ then reigning, was a life of suffering as modeled by Jesus himself.63 In Fear and Trembling (1843) Kierkegaard saw this experience of conflict exemplified in the Genesis story (22:1-19) of God’s demand that Abraham sacrifice his only son, through whom, as we have noted, the promise of an abundant progeny was to be realized. This episode, a daily reading in the Jewish liturgy, has as its moral the obligation to place ‘loyalty to God above all other considerations.’64 For Kierkegaard, the faith that Abraham displays is a resignation to the divine demand, one that encapsulates ‘the paradox of life and existence.’65 Such resignation brings ‘peace and repose in pain’; having made the choice between the finite present and the infinite.66 As a tragic hero, Abraham has chosen the latter, displaying that faith which is ‘the highest passion’ for persons.67 That life is comprised of seemingly impossible choices is hardly a profound insight; but that such a choice is presented as the dilemma for the observant Jew in every morning’s prayer is a prospect profoundly unsettling.68 In Lev Shestov (1866–1938) we find an attempt to recover some of the classic questions of religious thought. An exile in the religious sense as well as a product of a secular Diaspora (a Revolution-era Russian émigré) Shestov’s life echoed that of many predecessors dislodged from a relatively stable

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environment and exposed to the vicissitudes of alien cultures.69 The reader feels that Shestov’s work addresses the modern relation of theism and reason, and that Shestov is writing to the question of faith beyond the boundaries of Judaism. The problems Shestov confronts are so fundamental and traditional that persons unfamiliar with Russian thought might be excused for suspecting that his work contributes little original to the discourse. And, truth be told, the conventional organization of Shestov’s work promises less than the body of his thought actually delivers. (To be fair, we might keep in mind that treatises on these topics are rarer in the Russian philosophical tradition and hence might have stood out more prominently.70) As it happens, however, after adjusting for the linguistic barrier Shestov deserves to be ranked among the more powerful philosophers of religion in the early twentieth century.71 More problematic perhaps is the question whether Shestov’s work represents a Jewish voice in the discourse. The authors with whom he engages are as much a part of the gentile mainstream as the problems he and they confront, and one searches in vain for the Torah–Israel–God triad that marked contemporary and distinctively Jewish constructions. Writing for a European audience rather than the Russian intelligentsia (after the 1917 Revolution he moved to Paris and wrote mainly in French), Shestov is a critic of the positivistic and scientific mentality that overwhelmed his native land and threw his adoptive culture into the paradoxical confusion that results from overreliance on reason. As enigmatic as any of his émigré contemporaries, Shestov was Russian in temperament, Kierkegaardian in spirit, and Hasidic in religious worldview. As to the first of these, we need only note his early immersion in the literature of personal exile, of alienation within one’s own presumed zone of comfort, thought to be characteristic of the ‘silver age’ of Russian culture.72 His work continues the anguished affirmation of humanity found in Dostoevsky, and in fact Shestov has been called the greatest of Dostoevsky’s commentators.73 Shestov’s direct engagement with Kierkegaard came late, but affinities with his thought can be found throughout Shestov’s work. For Shestov, Kierkegaard was not a professional philosopher but a person who ‘thought in order to live and did not live in order to think.’74 Such thought ‘begins where all conceivable human certainty and probability bears witness to impossibility, i.e. the end, and where speculative philosophy falls silent.’75 The certainties of Idealist systems, the rigorous demands of scientific rationality, lead to the point reached by Abraham and Job: the demand for an affirmation, in faith, that all is not absurd. For Shestov and Kierkegaard, ‘Faith is a tremendous power arising out of the depths of the human spirit that is prepared and able to take up the struggle even when everything tells us that the struggle is condemned to failure beforehand.’76 The crisis or ‘end’ that is reached is most likely the predicament of rational secular modernity, the tragic flaw of excessive optimism in the progress of civilization.77 A Hasid in religious outlook is the most elusive characteristic to define, yet it is pervasive in Shestov’s work. Negatively it means that Shestov’s Judaism

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was not legalistic, but this is an unsatisfying definition. Affirmatively, Shestov’s Hasidic bearing may be found in an openness to the mystical dimension of experience, such as that found in the Book of Job, the Kabbalistic tradition, and Kierkegaard. All recognized, in Shestov’s view, not only the incomprehensible, but the paradoxical in the divine mystery, in which benevolence is experienced under contrary appearances. Strange to relate, Shestov associates this consciousness of the paradoxical with Luther, though that becomes less peculiar if we consider that he was reading Luther through a Kierkegaardian lens.78 The affirmation of a supra-rational deity working contrary to human norms and expectations may be true of certain forms of Protestantism (though it is inaccurate to attribute this to the modern mainstream); it is certainly true of Hasidism. As a cultural epoch the nineteenth century came to an end with the end of World War I; as an era in the history of philosophy it would have begun in 1781 with the publication of Kant’s first Critique. Although Jewish history is periodized differently, we can certainly see the long nineteenth century as a period of ferment and maturity unlike any earlier age. Most significantly, the era of secularization and emancipation placed into question the one aspect of Jewish identity that had previously been beyond dispute: the marginality of being exiles in strange lands. Thanks in part to new approaches to the scriptural narrative, as well as to the emergence of the phenomenological school in philosophy, the normativity of canonical revelation became a question on which Jewishness itself seemed to depend. To that question we now turn.

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Notes 1 2 3 4

5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18

19

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The revisionist view is stated clearly by Shmuel Feiner, ‘Towards a Historical Definition of the Haskalah,’ in New Perspectives on the Haskalah, ed. Shmuel Feiner and David Sorkin (Oxford: LLJC, 2004) 184–219. The dominant metaphor, as detailed by J. B. Schneewind, ‘Toward Enlightenment: Kant and the Sources of Darkness,’ CCEMP 328–52. Isaac Eisenstein-Barzilay, ‘The Treatment of the Jewish Religion in the Literature of the Berlin Haslakah,’ PAAJR 24 (1955) 39–68. The dilemma has a long history, with biblical warrants: see Michael A. Meyer, ed., German-Jewish History in Modern Times, vol. 2: Emancipation and Acculturation, 1780–1871 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997); Aaron Wildavsky, Assimilation versus Separation: Joseph the Administrator and the Politics of Religion in Biblical Israel (New Brunswick: Transaction, 2001); Jonathan M. Hess, Germans, Jews, and the Claims of Modernity (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002); David Ellenson, After Emancipation: Jewish Religious Responses to Modernity (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2004). Robert S. Wistrich, Revolutionary Jews from Marx to Trotsky (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1976). Michael L. Morgan, ‘Jewish Philosophy and Historical Self-Consciousness,’ JR 71 (1991) 36–49. Moses Mendelssohn, Philosophical Writings, tr. Daniel O. Dahlstrom (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997) 103. Mendelssohn, Philosophical Writings, 106–107. Moses Mendelssohn, Jerusalem: or On Religious Power and Judaism, tr. Allan Arkush (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1983) 70, 89, 99, 126. Mendelssohn, Jerusalem, 94, 96–98. Michah Gottlieb, ‘Mendelssohn’s Metaphysical Defense of Religious Pluralism,’ JR 86 (2006) 205–25. This was controversial in the extreme; for an assessment of his intentions see Edward Breuer, ‘Rabbinic Law and Spirituality in Mendelssohn’s Jerusalem,’ JQR 86 (1996) 229–321. Heinz Mosche Graupe, ‘Die philosophische Motive der Theologie S. L. Steinheims,’ in Salomon Ludwig Steinheim zum Gedenken, ed. Hans-Joachim Schoeps (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1966) 40–97. Joshua O. Haberman, Philosopher of Revelation: The Life and Thought of S. L. Steinheim (Philadelphia: JPS, 1990) 61; Haberman’s work contains a translation of the first volume of Steinheim’s treatise. Steinheim, The Revelation, 1.5, in Haberman, 107. Salomon Ludwig Steinheim, Die Offenbarug nach dem Lehrbegriffe der Synagoge (Altona: Gebrüder Bonn, 1835–56; rpt. New York: Arno Press, 1980), vol. 4, 7–8. Nathan Rotenstreich, ‘On the Notion of Tradition in Judaism,’ JR 28 (1948) 28–36. Robert S. Leventhal, ‘The Emergence of Philological Discourse in the German States, 1770–1810,’ Isis 77 (1986) 243–60; Anthony Grafton, ‘Prolegomena to Friedrich August Wolf,’ Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 44 (1981) 101–29; Rudolf Pfeiffer, History of Classical Scholarship from 1300 to 1850 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976) 173–77, 183–90. Nils Roemer, Jewish Scholarship and Culture in Nineteenth-Century Germany: Between History and Faith (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2005); Susannah Heschel, ‘Revolt of the Colonized: Abraham Geiger’s Wissenschaft des Judentums as a Challenge to Christian Hegemony in the Academy,’ NGC 77 (1999) 61–85. Fritz Bamberger, ‘Zunz’s Conception of History: A Study of the Philosophic Elements in Early Science of Judaism,’ PAAJR 11 (1941) 1–25, esp. 8–10, 20–23; Leon Wieseltier, ‘Etwas über die judische Historik: Leopold Zunz and the Inception of

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22 23

24

25 26 27

28 29 30 31

32 33

34

35

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Modern Jewish Historiography,’ H&T 20 (1981) 135–49. (The misspelling of ‘jüdische’ is Wieseltier’s, and consistent throughout his article.) Hegel himself saw in ‘Judaea’ only an inevitable slide into idolatry; see The Philosophy of History (Mineola, NY: Dover, 1956) 197–98. For predecessors, see Amy Newman, ‘The Death of Judaism in German Protestant Thought from Luther to Hegel,’ JAAR 61 (1993) 455–84. Nathan Rotenstreich, ‘The Idea of Historical Progress and Its Assumptions,’ H&T 10 (1971) 197–221. Hirsch, ‘A Sermon in the Science of Judaism,’ JMW 234–35; ‘Secession from the Community,’ Samson Raphael Hirsch, The Collected Writings, 8 vols. (New York: Feldheim, 1997), vol. 6, 170–86. On Hirsch’s role in modern Orthodoxy see Jacob Neusner, ‘Orthodox Judaism,’ EJ2 3.1889–1903, esp. 1898–1900. Robert Liberles, ‘Champion of Orthodoxy: The Emergence of Samson Raphael Hirsch as a Religious Leader,’ AJSR 6 (1981) 43–60; Shubert Spero, ‘Towards a Philosophy of Modern Orthodoxy,’ MJ 6 (1986) 79–90; David Singer, ‘The New Orthodox Theology,’ MJ 9 (1989) 35–54; and for broader context, Moshe Samet, ‘The Beginnings of Orthodoxy,’ MJ 8 (1988) 249–69. David Biale, ‘A Journey between Worlds: East European Jewish Culture from the Partitions of Poland to the Holocaust,’ in CJ 3 77–138. Allan Nadler, The Faith of the Mithnagdim: Rabbinic Responses to Hasidic Rapture (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997) 55–57, 64–70, 80–87, 153–59. For aspects and origins see Ivan Marcus, Piety and Society: The Jewish Pietists of Medieval Germany, EJM 10 (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1981); Robert Chazan, ‘The Early Development of Hasidut Askenaz,’ JQR n.s. 75 (1985) 199–211; Yitzhak Zimmer, ghwn wghnmk Mlw( (Jerusalem: Zalman Shazar, 1996); Elliot R. Wolfson, Through A Speculum That Shines: Vision and Imagination in Medieval Jewish Mysticism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994) 188–269. Haym Soloveitchik, ‘Three Themes in the Sefer Hasidim,’ AJSR 1 (1976) 311–57. Hans Joachim Stoebe, ‘Die Bedeuting des Wortes Häsäd im Alten Testament,’ VT 2 (1952) 244–54. Leonard B. Glick, Abraham’s Heirs: Jews and Christians in Medieval Europe (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1999) 234–74. The Sefer was translated by Sholom Alchanan Singer, Medieval Jewish Mysticism: Book of the Pious (Wheeling, IL: Whitehall, 1971); for context see Gershom Scholem, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism (New York: Schocken, 1995) 80–118 (questioned by Joseph Dan, ‘Ashkenazi Hasidim, 1941–1991: Was There Really a Hasidic Movement in Medieval Germany?,’ JM 2, 313–31); Ivan G. Marcus, ‘The Devotional Ideals of Ashkenazic Pietism,’ in JS 1.356–66. Simon Dubnow, Geschichte des Chassidismus, 2 vols. (Jerusalem: Jewish Publishing House, 1969), vol. 1, § 11, pp. 92–103. Adolf von Harnack, What is Christianity?, tr. Thomas Bailey Saunders (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1986); cf. p. 17: ‘I entertain no doubt that the founder had his eye upon man who, fundamentally, always remains the same, whether he be moving upwards or downwards, whether he be in riches or poverty, whether he be of strong mind or of weak.’ Among the most sympathetic responses was Felix Perles, ‘What Jews May Learn from Harnack,’ JQR 14 (1902) 517–43, later issued in German as Was lehrt uns Harnack? (Frankfurt: J. Kauffmann, 1902). The question of ‘essential’ Judaism sparked a polemical exchange between Franz Delitsch and Hermann Strack, about which see Alan T. Levenson, Between Philosemitism and Antisemitism: Defenses of Jews and Judaism in Germany, 1871–1932 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2004) 64–90. Walter Jacob, ‘Leo Baeck on Christianity,’ JQR n.s. 56 (1965) 158–72. Less favorable, and a response to Perles as much as to Harnack, is A[braham] Wolf, ‘Professor Harnack’s ‘What Is Christianity?’,’ JQR 16 (1904) 668–89. (Wolf’s own theology is

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36 37 38 39

40

41

42 43 44 45 46 47 48

49 50 51

52

Exile and Restoration in Jewish Thought contextualized and elucidated by Jacob Haberman, ‘Abraham Wolf: A Forgotten Jewish Reform Thinker,’ JQR 81 [1991] 267–304.) Leo Baeck, The Essence of Judaism (New York: Schocken, 1961) 26–29. For context and appreciation, see Michael A. Meyer, ‘The Thought of Leo Baeck: A Religious Philosophy for a Time of Adversity,’ MJ 19 (1999) 107–17. Baeck, Essence of Judaism, 98. Baeck, Essence of Judaism, 155–57. Notably, understanding modern Judaism according to ‘halakhic’ and ‘aggadic’ categories, or in terms functionally similar, allows us to see clearly the ways in which the former is organized around the interpretation of texts and the latter around the interpretation of experience. The constructive value of dialogue between these approaches has been noted by Eugene B. Borowitz, ‘The Prospects for Jewish Denominationalism,’ in Borowitz, Exploring Jewish Ethics: Papers on Covenant Responsibility (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1990) 375–84. Franz Brentano, Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint, tr. A. C. Rancurello et al. (London: Routledge, 1973) 88. For elucidation see the essays by Dale Jacquette (‘Brentano’s Concept of Intentionality,’ 98–130) and Joseph Margolis (‘Reflections on Intentionality,’ 131–48) in The Cambridge Companion to Brentano, ed. Dale Jacquette (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). Edmund Husserl, Husserliana: Gesammelte Werke (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1950) 3/1.188; Maurice Natanson, Edmund Husserl: Philosopher of Infinite Tasks (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973) 84–104. On Husserl’s debts to Brentano, see David Bell, Husserl (London and New York: Routledge, 1990) 3–28; Robin D. Hollinger, Husserl’s Position in the School of Brentano (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1999), and ‘Brentano and Husserl,’ in The Cambridge Companion to Brentano, 255–76; Ryan Hickerson, History of Intentionality: Theories of Consciousness from Brentano to Husserl (New York: Continuum, 2007). Edmund Husserl, Ideas: General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology, tr. W. R. Boyce Gibson (New York: Macmillan, 1962) 96–103, 155–67. Husserl, Ideas, 194. Husserl, Ideas, 242–43. Husserl, Ideas, 105–109; Mark P. Drost, ‘The Primacy of Perception in Husserl’s Theory of Imagining,’ PPR 1 (1990) 569–82. The German begreifen, cognate with English ‘grip,’ carries the same sense. Evan M. Zuesse, ‘The Role of Intentionality in the Phenomenology of Religion,’ JAAR 53 (1985) 51–73. Rudolf Otto, The Idea of the Holy, tr. John W. Harvey, 2nd edn. (London: Oxford University Press,1950) 12–24, 31–40. Paul Natorp, ‘Kant und die Marburger Schule,’ Kant-Studien 17 (1912) 193–221; Oscar Ewald, ‘German Philosophy in 1912,’ PR 22 (1913) 484–87; Henri Dussort, L’École de Marbourg (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1963); Guenther Zoeller, ‘Main Developments in Recent Scholarship on the Critique of Pure Reason,’ PPR 53 (1993) 463–65. Still illuminating is Fritz Kaufmann, ‘Cassirer, Neo-Kantianism, and Phenomenology,’ in The Philosophy of Ernst Cassirer, ed. Paul Arthur Schilpp (New York: Tudor Publishing Company, 1949) 801–54. On Cohen’s own place in the movement, see Peter Eli Gordon, ‘Science, Finitude, and Infinity: Neo-Kantianism and the Birth of Existentialism,’ Jewish Social Studies 6 (1999) 30–53. Sidney Axinn, ‘Kant on Judaism,’ JQR n.s. 59 (1968) 9–23; on this point, p. 14. Moshe Pelli, ‘The Impact of Deism on the Hebrew Literature of the Enlightenment in Germany,’ Eighteenth-Century Studies 6 (1972) 35–59. Ancient precedents had failed for various reasons; see Marc Hirshman, ‘Rabbinic Universalism in the Second and Third Centuries,’ HTR 93 (2000) 101–15; Jon D. Levenson, ‘The Universal Horizon of Biblical Particularism,’ Ethnicity and the Bible, ed. Mark G. Brett, BI 19 (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1986) 143–69. For excellent overviews of Cohen’s work see Sylvain Zac, La philosophie religieuse

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54 55 56 57

58

59 60 61 62 63 64 65

66 67 68 69 70

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de Hermann Cohen (Paris: Vrin, 1984) and Andrea Poma, The Critical Philosophy of Hermann Cohen, tr. John Denton (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997). For his attacks on Spinoza see Franz Naunen, ‘Hermann Cohen’s Perception of Spinoza: A Reappraisal,’ AJSR 4 (1979) 111–24. Die Religion der Vernunft aus den Quellen des Judentums (Leipzig: Gustav Fock and Frankfurt: J. Kauffmann, ca. 1919); the second edition (Frankfurt: Kauffmann, 1929, rpt. Wiesbaden: Fourier Verlag, 1978) omits the definite article. An early reviewer of the first edition, apparently reading apologetic intent into the specificity implied by the initial ‘die,’ understandably found the book flawed by circularity (Nathaniel Schmidt in PR 31 [1922] 68–74). William Kluback, The Legacy of Hermann Cohen. BJS 167 (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1989) 7, 14–16; also Kenneth Seeskin at HJP 789. In Jakob Klatkin’s view, Cohen’s greatest contribution to Jewish philosophy lay in his rigorous effort to ground Idealism in epistemology; see Hermann Cohen (Berlin: Jüdischer Verlag, 1919) 27. Hermann Cohen, Religion of Reason out of the Sources of Judaism, tr. Simon Kaplan (American Academy of Religion Texts and Translations, 7; Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1995) 4. Cohen, Religion of Reason, 33; on Cohen’s reduction of Judaism, or of religion generally, to ethics, see William Kluback, Hermann Cohen: The Challenge of a Religion of Reason, BJS 53 (Chico, CA: Scholars Press, 1984) 76–85, a view earlier articulated by Walter Goldstein, Hermann Cohen und die Zukunft Jisraels (Jerusalem: Rubin Mass, 1963) 36–41. Cohen, Religion of Reason, 102. William Kluback sees this as a response to Harnack’s Christian ‘essence’; see The Idea of Humanity: Hermann Cohen’s Legacy to Philosophy and Theology (Studies in Judaism; Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1987) 187–214. Cohen, Religion of Reason, 345; being the Kantian that he is, Cohen sees this response as ‘duty’ (Pflicht). Cohen, Religion of Reason, 40–41, 67, 121, 337 Cohen, Religion of Reason, 230. Cohen, Religion of Reason, 189. Claude Welch, Protestant Thought in the Nineteenth Century (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1972), vol. 1, 295–99. See The Complete ArtScroll Siddur, ed. Nosson Scherman et al. (New York: Mesorah Publications, 1984) 22–25; the moralization is found in the note on p. 22. Søren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling and the Sickness unto Death, tr. Walter Lowrie (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1968) 58. For a comparative treatment of Kierkegaardian and Hasidic approaches to this biblical episode, see Jerome Gellman, The Fear, The Trembling, and the Fire: Kierkegaard and Hasidic Masters on the Binding of Isaac (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1994). Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, 60. Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, 131. ‘This section constitutes the very reason for Israel’s existence in God’s eyes’ in the words of Meir Zlotowitz (AS Gen. 22:1, p. 780). Judith Deutsch Kornblatt, ‘The Apotheosis of Exile: Jews and the Russian Religious Renaissance (The Case of Lev Shestov),’ Symposium 57/3 (Fall 2003) 127–36. A running commentary on early Soviet-era Russian thought is the series of reports by Natalie Dugginton, ‘Philosophy in Russia,’ Journal of Philosophical Studies 1 (1926) 100–103, 376–79; 2 (1927) 225–28, 550–52; 3 (1928) 227–30, 516–18; 4 (1929) 552–54; 5 (1930) 598–601; Philosophy (the same journal renamed) 6 (1931) 225–28, 494–97; 7 (1932) 218–22, 471–73; 8 (1933) 216–18; 9 (1934) 217–19; 10 (1935) 222–24. For deeper background on the intellectual milieu see Andrzej Walicki, A History of Russion Thought from the Enlightenment to Marxism, tr. Hilda AndrewsRusiecka (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1979).

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71 Louis J. Shein, ‘Lev Shestov: A Russian Existentialist,’ Russian Review 26 (1967) 278–85, and, with more attention to the religious aspect of his philosophy, Louis J. Shein, ‘El existencialismo religioso de Lev Shestov,’ Folia Humanistica 14 (1976) 203–18. See also the testimonial of Nikolai Berdyaev in the Russian-French periodical Put’ (ушь) 58 (1938) 44–48 (reprinted in Speculation and Revelation, tr. Bernard Martin [Athens: Ohio University Press, 1982] 1–6). For Shestov’s critique of Berdyaev’s work, see the essay ‘нозис и зкистенщиалная философия’ (‘Nikolai Berdyaev: Gnosis and Existential Philosophy’ [Speculation and Revelation, 232–66]) which appeared in October of that year (овременные записки 67 [1938] 196–229). 72 See David Patterson, Exile: The Sense of Alienation in Modern Russian Letters (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1995); also William Cannon Weidemaier, ‘Herzen and the Existential World View: A New Approach to an Old Debate,’ Slavic Review 40 (1981) 557–69. Shestov’s own assessment of this era is captured in his essay ‘Speculation and Apocalypse: The Religious Philosophy of Vladimir Solovyov,’ in Lev Shestov, Speculation and Revelation, 18–88. 73 D. S. Mirsky, A History of Russian Literature from its Beginnings to 1900, ed. F. J. Whitfield (New York: Vintage, 1958) 286. 74 Shestov, ‘Kierkegaard as a Religious Philosopher,’ in Speculation and Revelation, 203–31; here: p. 204. 75 Shestov, ‘Kierkegaard,’ 215. 76 Shestov, ‘Kierkegaard,’ 222. 77 Michael Weingrad, ‘New Encounters with Shestov,’ Journal of Jewish Thought and Philosophy 11 (2002) 49–62. 78 In identifying the Existential imagination in Western thought, Shestov is insightful but not always precise. See e.g. Athènes et Jérusalem: Un essai de philosophie religieuse, tr. Boris de Schloezer (Paris: Flammarion, 1967) 153–70, where his looseness in identifying the ‘Lutheran’ element is especially inaccurate. Shestov’s agenda in this work has been exposed by Brian Horowitz, ‘The Demolition of Reason in Shestov’s Athens and Jerusalem,’ Poetics Today 19 (1998) 221–33.

Chapter 5

REVELATION

TORAH IN A TIME OF CHANGE ‘In the beginning was the deed’: Thus the Faust of Goethe’s great tragedy (line 1237), trying to capture the opening of John’s Gospel and giving up on ‘word,’ ‘mind,’ and ‘force.’ But it is a word that the legendary savant is rendering, for the text was there before he began to struggle with it. Likewise with Judaism, the text makes the initial demand, and the response to it is the deed: the life of the people who claim it as their own. Precise enough to have been transmitted with the utmost scribal exactitude, and at the same time so demanding as to stir bitter controversy about its meaning, Torah is both fixed and fluid. It is a set body of writings, the books the Qur‘ān alludes to in calling the Jews the ‘people of the book’; but it is also an open tradition of instruction and narrative. Torah is textual; but it is also oral, for it is transmitted by recitation.1 It is prescriptive as well as historically descriptive: that is, it is both law and legend. In short, it is all sorts of things, with one operative proviso: it is that to which the religious Jew intentionally adheres. Whatever its boundaries or application, Torah has been understood by Jews as qualitatively distinct among bodies of learning because it mediates the divine–human relationship in a unique way. Whether through literal inspiration or a more diffuse sense of divine guidance, Torah has been understood as a bridge between the finite and the transcendent. And as such it demands severe effort in definition and elucidation. Notions that ‘Torah’ was a fluid concept go back to Spinoza, if not earlier, and they became focused in academic circles in the nineteenth century.2 Historical research into texts and traditions suggested that the core documents of Judaism were cultural products rather than divine revelation, and some of the ensuing division accentuated the chasm between Reform Judaism and Orthodoxy. In addition to questions of whether Torah was both written and oral, attempts to determine its authoritative character resulted more often in dissonance than in consensus.3 At the beginning of the twentieth century, few questions in Jewish thought were more pressing than the status of Torah.

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REVELATION AND HASIDISM As we saw in the last chapter, Hasidism was arguably the most vibrant movement of affective revival in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and one that expended little effort on questions about modernization and secularization. The Baal Shem Tov and his companions in the Eastern European shtetls could hardly have imagined that their enthusiastic movement would be a dynamic force in twentieth century Judaism. If, as we have suggested, currents of modern Jewish thought may be more accurately understood by the categories of aggadic and halakhic, we see in modern Hasidism a powerful articulation of the aggadic orientation. And two of the best known thinkers of the twentieth century are heirs of the Hasidic legacy: Martin Buber and Abraham Heschel. Despite an almost iconic prominence as a thinker who both represents modern Jewish thought and offers a basis for mutual understanding between Jews and Christians, the real Martin Buber was an elusive and complex character, whose thought is irreducible to a single theme and whose work resists being captured in a single text. A Viennese Jew and a cultural Zionist; a philosopher whose doctoral dissertation was on two Christian authors, Nicholas of Cusa and Jacob Boehme; a cosmopolite and a Hasid: in others these components might ensure that one is nothing more than a walking contradiction. In Buber they all seemed to come together (in 1935 Hannah Arendt called him ‘German Judaism’s incontestable guide’4), although later interpreters have struggled to find an overarching unifying principle.5 Raised in the long afterglow of German Idealism, Buber was conditioned to seeing patterns and relations among otherwise discrete details, and as an observer he tended to start with the macrocosmic and arrange the particulars according to the interpretive structure. In the work of Martin Buber we find perhaps the most enigmatic confluence of separate lines of thought. Buber eludes any overarching generalization and in that respect possibly best represents the disciplined eclecticism needed for a coherent vision in the twentieth century. During a period of dislocation the conventional lines of discourse can quickly be reckoned as insufficient. Equally at home in cosmopolitan and provincial worlds, Buber was familiar with the thought and culture of the liberal secular elite and the traditional folkways of yiddishkeit. Thoroughly grounded in the Western tradition, Buber’s appeal reached an unusually wide readership of Jews and gentiles alike; and even today he is perhaps the modern Jewish author best known among Christian readers. In addition to giving a voice to Eastern European Hasidism, and in that sense serving as the preserver of an oral culture that in a few decades would be obliterated, Buber was one of the more prolific and popular interpreters of Judaism for a readership, both Jewish and Christian, largely unfamiliar with its fundamental tenets. And his work has spoken to Christians in a way unmatched by any other Jewish author of the twentieth century.6

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Buber can be considered a ‘stealth’ phenomenologist. He does not use the jargon current in philosophical circles at the time, nor was his work much noticed by the philosophical community, yet his writing cannot be fully understood without considering the influence of his philosophical contemporaries. The popularity of his own work as a lucid and helpful modern exposition of Judaism is testimony to the clarity of his thought and writing. Buber’s achievement appears even more remarkable when one takes account of the largely hidden philosophical dimension of his work. Describing Judaism as ‘a phenomenon of religious reality,’ Buber early on conceptualizes Jewish experience as encounter with a deity irreducible to such categories as transcendent and immanent.7 The experience of duality is for Buber a condition for seeking unity, the normative state against which particularity is the deviant one. In Buber’s essay on Jewish religiosity he states that ‘No man knows the abyss of inner dualism so well as the Jew, but neither does anyone know so well the miracle of unification, which cannot be accepted on faith but must be experienced.’ 8 Fragmentation and its resolution are the structural poles of Jewish experience, both historically and individually; the deity affirmed as One in the shema is realized in the experience of oneness in this life. Buber began as a Hasid: his earliest work was a redaction of some of the folklore surrounding the Baal Shem Tov, and emotionally he never strayed far from those roots, no matter how cosmopolitan his cultural location or how ruined the world of the Eastern European shtetl.9 Yet one inescapable truth about Hasidism is that it is an oral tradition, one maintained by conversation rather than by books. Thus however prolifically or eloquently one writes about Hasidism, any text claiming to capture its nature is necessarily a distortion of the original experience. Buber recognized this and, to the extent that his work is an ongoing advocacy for dialogue, serves as a mediator between interlocutors rather than as the didactic authority instructing a passive learner. Consonant with his Hasidic roots as well as with the larger perspective of revelation, Buber knows that understanding begins with the spoken word. And it continues by means of ongoing conversation.10 Only such dialogue can close the chasm between the primitive norm of revelation and the modern person. Contemporary humans are confronted, when they enter the Bible, with a dialogue already underway between God and the patriarchs, God and the prophets, God and the characters of narratives heroic and mundane. More often, according to Buber, modern humanity resists entering into such dialogue because of the response it demands: ‘Man of today resists the Scriptures because he no longer wants to accept responsibility. He thinks he is venturing a great deal, yet he industriously evades the one real venture, that of responsibility.’11 Adhering to the traditional thematic triad of creation, revelation, and redemption, Buber presents these not as moments frozen in the scriptural canon but as mirrors to each person’s experience. Engagement with scripture is for

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Buber the starting point for the encounter with finitude that brings contemporary humans to the brink: The lived moment leads directly to the knowledge of creation, and thinking about birth leads indirectly to the knowledge of creation. But in his personal life probably not one of us will taste the essence of redemption before his last hour. And yet here, too, there is an approach. It is dark and silent and cannot be indicated by any means, save by my asking you to recall your own dark and silent hours. I mean those hours in the lowest depths when our soul hovers over the frail trap door which, at the very next instant, may send us down into destruction, madness, and suicide at our own verdict. Indeed, we are astonished that it has not opened up until now. But suddenly we feel a touch as of a hand. It reaches down to us, it wishes to be grasped – and yet what incredible courage is needed to take the hand, to let it draw us up out of the darkness! This is redemption.12 THE PROPHETIC VOICE Abraham Joshua Heschel: a towering figure in American life in the middle of the twentieth century and an icon of religious activism in both the civil rights movement and opposition to the Vietnam War, the Jewish component of a triad that included Martin Luther King and William Sloane Coffin. Before that, he was a notable figure in the Polish Hasidic milieu in which he was virtually the dynastic heir to the Baal Shem Tov.13 A migrant among communities as he was, Heschel’s itinerary took him from Warsaw to Vilna in Lithuania, the longstanding center of Talmudic resistance to Hasidism, and thence to Berlin where he was exposed to (but not immersed in) the progressive-liberal approach of Wissenschaft des Judentums. So mixed a background was sure to yield unconventional results, and some of Heschel’s earliest literary productions were poems, most in Yiddish but some in German as well.14 While the storm of Nazi Germany was brewing, Heschel joined Buber at the Frankfurt Lehrhaus and threw himself into the adult education work that was the institution’s mission. As the legal sanctions against Jews gave way to active oppression and persecution, Heschel, unable to save any of his family still in Warsaw, escaped to London, where he received an invitation to teach on the Bible at Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati. He arrived in the States in 1940. With the exception of one sister who emigrated to New York, the rest of his family – his mother and three sisters – died during the next five years.15 Abraham Joshua Heschel’s two-volume Torah from Heaven (1962–65) was written in Hebrew, a daring move for a work on that scale and an indication that Heschel wished it to be taken seriously by an international Jewish readership.16 Displaying intensive engagement with the sources as

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well as Heschel’s characteristic tendency to clarify by means of distinctions, Torah is most successful as an evocation of the continuing relevance of aggadah. Far from being antiquarian folklore, the legendary dimension of Torah comes into its own, in Heschel’s work, as the normative force of the Diaspora. In distinguishing observance in the disposition from obedience to the law, Heschel seeks to revitalize the ancient examples of piety by associating them with duties of the heart rather than of the limbs.17 Aggadah thus becomes the pattern for Jewish life in the absence of practicable halakhah, the indicated form of loyalty to the revealer of Torah. By its nature, however, aggadah is not authoritative, for narrative is not prescriptive in the same way that law is. And even to call it exemplary is ambiguous, for one can follow examples without the spirit that originally gave them their heroic character. For Heschel the narrative inspires a devotional spirit contrary to legalism, distinct even from rational reflection on the meaning of the text. Torah for Heschel, comprising both halakhah and aggadah, can best be understood as text and spirit working in concert upon the pious individual. His exposition as a result seems exaggerated in its presentation of contrasts, but once one recognizes the interdependence of the various polarities, the constant alternations give way to a peculiar feeling of unity. Heschel understands revelation as dialectical, with the tension between precept, personified by Rabbi Akiva, and model, exemplified by Rabbi Ishmael, being resolved in their interdependence. Juxtaposing complementary attitudes, each associated with a recognized figure in Rabbinic lore, does more than recall the story-telling form of instruction found in the shtetl environment – although it certainly does that also.18 Heschel’s method implies that each of the schools that originally followed these masters was incomplete in itself, that the sects of the early Diaspora, like Written and Oral Torah, were complementary rather than mutually exclusive, but normative only when the interpreter is recognized as an instrument of revelation. Prophets are thought to perceive the intangible, and this capacity has privileged and marginalized those possessing, or claiming to possess, prophetic ability. But as we saw in the example of Shabbetai Zevi, claims to supernatural charisma could elicit the stigma due a false messiah, and the desacralizing of the biblical text in historical-critical circles tended to increase skepticism toward traditional assumptions about inspiration. The emergence of phenomenology offered a powerful explanatory tool for interpreters of sacred literature, namely the possibility of conceptualizing prophecy as a mode of intentional consciousness.19 An early work in this line of inquiry, Heschel’s Berlin doctoral dissertation on prophetic consciousness, represents an initial step in applying phenomenological analysis to the experience of the sacred. For Heschel, the prophets did not have merely the reflexive awareness of being prophets, but were in fact driven by a conviction, in some sense an energy, originating outside themselves. Simply stated, what Heschel found distinctive in the prophetic texts was not the text itself or the

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irretrievable charisma of the ancient principals so much as the experience of the divine reflected in and evoked by the ‘prophetic’ relation to God and the people.20 Whereas Heschel associates this energy with the daemonic ecstasy of archaic Greek culture, he also recognizes that the Hebrew prophets are shaped by (rather than shapers of, as many would say) a unique relationship with the unique covenantal deity.21 Heschel’s work would not mature until the 1950s; in the generation before his Buber became the most articulate voice for the new approach. In books such as The Prophetic Faith and Moses, Buber enunciated prophecy for an age weary and wary of religious posturing. Buber’s prophetic individual, as well as his Moses, is both leader and servant, one who ‘suffers and acts as Israel … He is Israel the servant.’22 Moses, simultaneously flawed and heroic as he is, represents ‘the tragedy inherent in Revelation. It is laid upon the stammering to bring the voice of Heaven to earth.’23 One constant stands out in Buber’s work: the unquestioned existence of God, specifically the covenantal deity of theistic religion. Acknowledging the existence of a transcendent agent is a necessary condition for appreciating Buber, just as it was very likely a barrier for readers outside the monotheistic matrix. Three decades and a cataclysm separate Heschel’s philosophical dissertation from the work which would make him an acknowledged master of biblical thought.24 The Prophets appeared in 1962, with a dedication ‘to the martyrs of 1940–45’ and seven lines from Ps. 44. The subject of his book, Heschel informs his readers at the outset, is ‘the men whose image is our relief in distress, and whose voice and vision sustain our faith.’25 Far from being an introduction to the biblical texts that comprise the prophetic corpus, Heschel’s work is a treatise on the core values of Jewish piety as refracted though the prophetic books. The postwar decades in biblical scholarship in the US brought a harvest of commentaries applying historical-critical methods to texts earlier deemed immune to such scrutiny, and the reader who expects from Heschel’s work another introduction to biblical books will surely be disappointed.26 So too will readers expecting from Heschel more of the fire-and-brimstone evocations of a wrathful deity that tend to be associated with this band of – in Heschel’s own words – ‘some of the most disturbing people who have ever lived.’27 Disrupting the complacency of the people was surely their calling, but menacing Israel with threats of divine anger was not their ultimate purpose. Rather, for Heschel, the prophetic corpus reveals divine pathos, a God who suffers when the people are disobedient. The harshness, as Heschel sees it, is a mask for God’s own feeling of alienation from the covenantal people. Heschel’s constructive effort runs counter to the wrathful-deity rhetoric of Christian exegetes, as well as to the strand within Orthodoxy that saw in the Holocaust a divine punishment for the disloyalty of assimilation and secularization. Heschel’s dedicatory excerpt from the Psalm, when seen as an epigraph to this treatise on divine pathos, becomes a reproach to those Jewish voices who asserted that God’s wrath had been the moving force behind the destruction of European Jewry.

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The Prophets should be understood as a constructive effort, a confessional document rather than the phenomenological venture represented by the doctoral thesis or a scholarly product of biblical research. As with any work of theological construction, the success of Heschel’s argument here rests on its persuasiveness as much as on its logical rigor. Heschel’s work appeals to religious desire itself: his claim is that God longs for devoted oneness with humanity, and that the alienation caused by the absence of this is mutual: God is in as abnormal a state as humanity is when the intimate bond has been ruptured. Divine pathos, which Heschel finds throughout the prophetic corpus, risks being seen as blatant anthropomorphism (as does divine wrath), but represents more significantly a move toward healing. The approach one takes to one who is injured is entirely different from how one appeases another’s rage. What is most brilliant in The Prophets is Heschel’s evident awareness that comfort is most easily gained when it is given.28 It was not only the Jewish world that was traumatized by the events of World War II. Christian thinkers left and right saw the catastrophic results as symptoms of profound social ills for which the indicated remedy was a new form of religious commitment. For Rudolf Bultmann, for example, the core of revelation was a divine ‘announcement’ that endured over time even though the narrative in which it was conveyed was subject to continual reinterpretation. The parallels are substantial: inspired persons (prophets, Jesus) mediate a revelatory message, communicating it in terms that demand intensive scrutiny in each age. As with Heschel’s divine pathos, the Bultmannian ‘kerygma’ of atonement is a message recognized and maintained only by and within the community of faith. Its validity depends on consensus. Heschel was himself a prophetic figure, and would become a forceful one in the final decade of his life. Was he in his practice a prophet of the wrathful or the sympathetic God? The latter, and by all accounts emphatically: pursuing reconciliation, advocating for social justice, proclaiming pacifism: Heschel’s public life was a sustained exemplar of a sense of God that idealized unity and rejected tension.29 Alongside the forceful prophetic work, Heschel also contributed to the Jewish philosophical tradition. ‘Can a Hasid be a genuine philosopher?’ is a question that most would answer in the negative, with or without demanding definitions of the terms of the equation. Heschel was undeniably a Hasid to the core and to the end, proof that one can be both a mystic and a social activist. As a philosopher Heschel has not enjoyed the enduring reputation that Buber has, nor has there been a revival of interest in his work such as the recent rediscoveries of Rosenzweig and Soloveitchik. Buber is proof positive that a Hasid can create powerful philosophical positions. Heschel’s own work, while it does not approach the profundity displayed by some of his contemporaries, nevertheless articulates a religious philosophy worthy of serious attention. Systematic he is not: it was not in his nature to construct comprehensive projects, and his writings have an oratorical flair that speaks to the emotions rather than to reason. (In this aspect the legacy

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of his mentor Max Dessoir remained a powerful force in his work.30) On the other hand, his scholarly engagement with the classics of Jewish thought reveals philosophical concerns not always evident in his more popular writings.31 Questioning whether the Hasidic tradition can support philosophical inquiry can reveal a narrowness of outlook guaranteed to perpetuate factional divisions. There is no question that Heschel holds an internally consistent worldview, one that speaks to the universal human condition rather than to one tradition alone. (This we may consider a boundarymarker between philosophy and theology.) That it is a religious worldview goes without saying: but Heschel’s is a voice that speaks beyond the borders of the covenant. When one is in deep diaspora, a condition that describes the émigré community in the States, a mixed audience is the only one there is. Significantly, Heschel is calling upon general perceptions of God rather than the unique deity of his own tradition. In works like his 1951 Man Is Not Alone, Heschel begins where philosophy should begin: with wonder, or what he calls ‘radical amazement.’32 For Heschel, the object of wonder is that which transcends the knowable: a realm that is intrinsically mysterious and necessarily real. Heschel advocates an attitude of openness to mystery as the spiritual antidote to modernity. One of the consequences of technological culture, in Heschel’s view, has been the rapid pace of change, in turn resulting in a restless desire for permanence. There is not a soul on earth which, however vaguely or rarely, has not realized that life is dismal if not mirrored in something which is lasting. We are all in search of a conviction that there is something which is worth the toil of living. There is not a soul which has not felt a craving to know of something that outlasts life, strife, and agony.33 According to Heschel, what modern humanity seeks most is existence. ‘There is always a minimum of meaning in our notion of existence.’34 The critical moment in this striving for meaning is the move to faith, negatively an admission of the impossibility of knowing, positively the acknowledgment of a transcendent reality. Echoing the language of phenomenology, Heschel states that ‘Authentic faith is more than an echo of a tradition. It is a creative situation, an event,’35 or in his more academic jargon, a work of consciousness or Bewußtsein when confronted with the unknowable. Asserting that each person has at least once experienced ‘the momentous reality of God,’ Heschel understands faith in terms that many apply to conversion experiences. ‘The remembrance of that experience and the loyalty to the response of that moment are the forces that sustain our faith. In this sense, faith is faithfulness, loyalty to an event, loyalty to our response.’36

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TALMUDISM: THE OLD TALMUD AND THE NEW The publication in 1984 of a slim volume by a professor of historical theology at Yale Divinity School marked the maturing of lines of thought that had been percolating for two decades if not longer.37 George Lindbeck, a Lutheran active in Protestant–Catholic dialogue and a leader in the ecumenical movement, inaugurated a new school of constructive thought by thematizing the ‘postliberal’ as a fundamental cultural condition for Christian thought at the end of the twentieth century. Like postmodernism elsewhere in the humanities, the postliberal perspective holds that the dominant trend originating in the Enlightenment was either inherently flawed or has been ruptured by skepticism during the twentieth century. Instead of abandoning tradition, however, postliberal theology has been marked by a return to the pre-modern sources, a move aptly termed the ‘second naiveté’ by one of its leading theorists, who describes it as ‘the postcritical element of the precritical hierophany.’38 Although not noticeably involved on his own in discussion of Jewish–Christian relations, Lindbeck expressed something that had long been implicit in Jewish thought: that the apparent absence of order in the external world was not a terminal diagnosis of meaninglessness. By contrast, the deficiencies in a satisfying correlation between coherence and correspondence prepare conditions for a leap of commitment to meaningfulness. The alternative, acknowledging disorder and normalizing despair, must be deemed more disorienting than capitulating to a hope in an order not evidenced by material experience. In a world considered absurd at one level, finding sufficient sense to guide oneself becomes an act of will and creativity at another, presumably higher, level. The retrieval of tradition that was signaled by the recovery of Talmudic study must in one sense be understood in its post-traditional context. In another sense, however, it must be recognized as a continuation of pious work unbroken by the ‘caesura’ of modernity. The deflation of cultural traditions is both a leveling and an incentive to commitment, and the choice between theism and atheism is presented anew to seekers for meaning in a world seemingly gone chaotic. Joseph Dov Soloveitchik39 (1903–93) and Emmanuel Levinas (1906–95): contemporaries and products of Eastern European Jewry, the former a Berlintrained philosopher with a PhD dissertation on Hermann Cohen, the latter a student and interpreter of Husserl – the differences between these two thinkers are as obvious as their similarities. For our purposes the salient question is their approach to the Talmudic tradition, for Talmudists they both were no matter how far their philosophies diverged. Soloveitchik was to the manner born, the heir of a Lithuanian rabbinical legacy connected to the legendary Gaon of Vilna and known in the late nineteenth century for an innovative pedagogical method supporting creative engagement with the Talmudic corpus. A critic of Marburg Neo-Kantianism

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who saw in Hermann Cohen’s work the devaluing of the spiritual, Soloveitchik sought to restore the unity of thinking and consciousness (Bewußtsein) that he found in Kant.40 Following in the footsteps of his father Moshe, who had become director of the Orthodox rabbinical seminary in New York (just as it became part of Yeshiva University), Soloveitchik migrated to the United States in 1932 and in 1941 joined the Yeshiva faculty, becoming professor of Jewish philosophy and the beloved ‘Rav’ to generations of students.41 A deceptive simplicity marks Soloveitchik’s work: his ability to render rich erudition accessible to a non-professional audience came at a cost, and only in recent years has his work been regarded as an original contribution within the constraints of traditional Jewish thought. As it happens, Soloveitchik’s work represents a synthesis of Talmudism and Continental existentialism, and an impressively coherent one at that.42 As with his philosophical contemporaries, Soloveitchik’s starting point is a phenomenological anthropology in which clarifying the conditions for understanding necessarily precedes any knowledge of the self. In Halakhic Man, Soloveitchik presents reality as two-fold, open and concealed, and the human encounter with it as either monistic or dualistic, each being rather obviously incomplete.43 Only the homo religiosus can tolerate the contradiction between sensory certainty and the ever-elusive comprehensive knowledge of the world.44 Yet the homo religiosus, a spiritual seeker after an unspecified goal, is doomed to the dissatisfaction of never attaining a goal congruent with the needs of the spirit. ‘The will of homo religiosus gradually wanes to nothingness, and his selfhood is inexorably extinguished inasmuch as he desires to immerse himself in the totality of existence and to unite with infinity.’45 Conditioned, as it were, to a choice between futility and fulfillment, Soloveitchik’s religious individual becomes aware, in an almost Augustinian sense, that the object of yearning transcends the material realm.46 Herein of course lies a substantial obstacle, for halakhah, as a body of codified law, is as tangible as any cultural product and can easily be taken as nothing more than simply another one. For Soloveitchik, the Halakhic individual discerns a qualitative difference between revelation and human creativity, with halakhah, and consciousness of it, unique in human understanding.47 In Soloveitchik’s words, ‘Halakhic man apprehends transcendence. However, instead of rising up to it, he tries to bring it down to him.’48 ‘Halakhah has a fixed a priori relationship to the whole of reality in all of its fine and detailed particulars. Halakhic man orients himself to the entire cosmos and tries to understand it by utilizing an ideal world which he bears in his halakhic consciousness.’49 For Soloveitchik, as for all mid-century émigrés, this idealization contains an element of nostalgia for a world in which the talmudic life was the unquestioned core.50 According to Soloveitchik, halakhah mediates the absolute and the finite by serving as the tangible manifestation of the divine will and in that sense a

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material instantiation of the transcendent ideal. ‘Holiness,’ says Soloveitchik, ‘means the holiness of earthly, here-and-now life.’51 Whereas homo religiosus ‘attempts to extricate himself from the narrow straits of empirical existence and emerge into the wide spaces of a pure and pristine transcendental existence,’ the Halakhic individual ‘longs to bring transcendence down into this valley of the shadow of death – i.e., into our world – and transform it into the land of the living.’52 The Halakhic individual is thus both related to transcendence differently from the homo religiosus and adheres to a different goal: ‘to purify this world, not to escape from it.’53 Such an end calls for the full application of personal energy, and Soloveitchik devotes the second part of Halakhic Man to the ‘creative capacity’ of the Torah-centered person. The Halakhic individual – indeed humanity generally – participates in divine activity and creativity: ‘Action and creation are the true distinguishing marks of authentic existence.’54 Soloveitchik’s ‘man of God’ is one whose ‘whole existence, like some enchanted stream, rushes onward to distant magical regions. He is dynamic, not static, does not remain at rest but moves forward in an ever-increasing climb.’55 Such a person possesses a ‘prophetic’ impulse, in Soloveitchik’s words, that transforms human passivity into a divinely guided agency: indeed has transcended his or her organic nature.56 Hence the prophetic consciousness is realized in the ethical, rather than the devotional, realm.57 Whether one calls the experience prophetic, intuitive, or mystical, transcendence comes with a price: among other things, it demands a clear understanding of one’s relation to the realm out of which one has emerged. It hardly needs stating that much mid-twentieth century religious thought is an implicit – and sometimes quite explicit – critique of technological modernity. And Soloveitchik, who with his contemporaries witnessed and endured the brutal shadow-side of secular civilization, addressed the isolation of the faithful individual within materialistic culture. For Soloveitchik, the gains wrought by control over nature have come at the cost of complete human self-knowledge, without which the person of faith experiences a jarring sense of purposelessness. ‘I could not,’ says Soloveitchik, ‘shake off the disquieting feeling that the practical role of the man of faith within modern society is a very difficult, indeed, a paradoxical one.’58 In prose more meditative than academic, Soloveitchik offers a biblical explanation for the vexatious predicament of the faithful person in a society ‘which is technically minded, self-centered, self-loving, almost in a sickly narcissistic fashion, scoring honor upon honor, piling up victory upon victory, reaching for distant galaxies, and seeing in the here-and-now sensible world the only manifestation of being.’59 In an exegesis veritably scornful of the documentary hypothesis, Soloveitchik evokes the two Adams of Gen. 1-2 and portrays them as complementary models for human self-understanding. Dominance over nature is the role of the prior Adam, the possessor of the divine image and likeness, while the second Adam, formed from the soil and animated by the breath of life, was charged with cultivating the garden which

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God had planted.60 The first Adam, in Soloveitchik’s view, was ‘aggressive, bold, and victory-minded,’ and his modern-day representative is the scientist, who ‘constructs his own world and in mysterious fashion succeeds in controlling his environment through manipulating his own mathematical constructs and creations.’61 The second Adam is the person who questions the purpose of the natural universe but does not resort to scientific explanations for answers. Construing one’s situation as a state of being ‘cast’ into a ‘given’ world, this individual experiences ‘naïveté, awe, and admiration’ in an ‘irresistibly fascinating qualitative world where he establishes an intimate relation with God.’62 For Soloveitchik, this sense of wonder is at the same time a source of discomfort, for the intimate relation with God has a counterpart in strained coexistence with other persons – at least with other persons of the First Adam type. Hence the Second Adam, in a state of solitude unrelieved by ordinary social relations, seeks ‘a new kind of fellowship, which one finds in the existential community,’ where ‘one lonely soul finds another soul tormented by loneliness and solitude yet unqualifiedly committed.’63 Soloveitchik’s ‘lonely man of faith’ lives in two dimensions: one, a state of alienation within the materialistic environment, and a state of intimacy within the covenantal or halakhic community. Each ‘Adam’ is incomplete without the other, and like the Halakhic individual of his earlier work, Soloveitchik’s person of faith is necessarily active in a faithless world; the second Adam, in short, gives meaning to the work of the first one.64 The integration of the two aspects, while never realizable in this life, is for Soloveitchik both the remedy for the impulse toward control, which if left unchecked can yield demonic results, and the means toward ‘redemption from the inadequacies of finitude and, mainly, from the flux of temporality.’65 HOMO TALMUDICUS Emmanuel Levinas defies the superficial similarities and is quite unlike Soloveitchik in various ways. He was first of all a philosopher thoroughly attuned to the contemporary discourse, and his participation in it is as evident in his works as the world of Lithuanian rabbinism is in Soloveitchik’s.66 Second, his work addresses the ethical situation of the individual quite directly, so that a reader often needs to work through the surface of his writings to uncover the larger philosophical matrix which gives them all a coherent sense. Indeed one cannot begin to understand Levinas in detail without a thorough preparation in phenomenology, yet he writes as if his thoughts are as clear as day. Moreover, Levinas is a thinker of unusual hermeneutical subtlety, a theorist of the art of reading whose insights place him on a par with Gadamer and Ricoeur. Had more of his work been focused on material accessible from outside his own tradition, his thought might have transformed current concepts of interpretation even further.67

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Levinas was a philosopher in the European tradition, but a Jew first. For him, the experience of bondage and liberation foretold in Exodus is recapitulated in his own generation and determines his relation to others. ‘The traumatic experience of my slavery in Egypt constitutes my very humanity, a fact that immediately allies me to the workers, the wretched, and the persecuted peoples of the world.’68 Oral tradition was the constitutive shaper of the community of interpretation; as we have seen, it was a bond both social and devotional. It was also so implicit in the culture as not to need, indeed to resist, written form, since reduction to writing is potentially destructive for an esoteric and continuously evolving movement. Aware of the dangers of a didactic posture, Levinas often writes in an exegetical mode, offering his thought in the form of commentary to scriptural or talmudic texts.69 Although this is not the work for which Levinas is best known, his exegetical pieces reveal his participation in the religious hermeneutic community held together by the tension between fixed texts and continually shifting patterns of reception. Levinas’s ventures into Talmudic material bear little resemblance to the responsa of the rabbinic tradition; in fact a reader seeking halakhic guidance will likely be disappointed. But such a reader comes with prior assumptions about the tradition – shtetl, mitnagdim, authority – that no longer have any correspondence with the Jewish culture of postwar Europe. Levinas does not seek to preserve the memory of Lithuanian Jewry; instead, he reflects the sensibility of a new environment, one in which engagement with others is not only possible but necessary.70 Talmud, then, being (unlike scripture) a canon inherited by the Jews alone, serves as a differentiating factor in the dialogue with other cultures. In other words, it shapes the particular self-understanding of the people in a radically altered world, while (perhaps secondarily) perpetuating the tradition of learning that is the core of Diaspora culture. Levinas’s Talmudic essays are addressed to a postwar Jewry in the secular France of the 1960s, and they resemble sermons more than academic lectures, despite their apparent lack of conventional piety. In contrast to the dominant separation of the religious and moral, Levinas emphasizes that the experience of God is mediated by actions among persons.71 Hence the triad of nature – culture – supernature remains, but the supernatural is not experienced outside of the cultural dimension. Just as the oral tradition is an inadequate yet necessary redaction of the ancient body of rabbinic discourse, so is the modern reading of texts a frail copy of authentic engagement, intrinsically inadequate and demanding encounter with others.72 One striking feature of Levinas’s exposition of Talmudic passages is his penchant for allegorizing. Crowns as forms of sovereignty, tables of marble and gold as symbolic of the values that make persons worthy, with the showbread of Ex. 25:30 as the holiness being elevated:73 Levinas works with metaphors such as these to bring the purity codes of the rabbinical era into the lives of modern (and doubly alienated) Jews.

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Debates about Torah and Revelation have been a sustaining force in Jewish thought. Learning and piety had been closely related terms in Diaspora Judaism before the advent of modernity. Not quite interchangeable, they were nevertheless directed to the same end with the same hope of a restoration from exile. Continuity of purpose had been greatly aided by isolation both cultural and linguistic: geographically dispersed the medieval and early modern communities might be, but hermeneutically there seems to have been a uniformity of outlook that preserved some form of intentional unity among the children of Israel. Little by little, and by a process best understood by social historians, the barriers began to disintegrate and the hitherto marginalized began to integrate. Modernity, however it was defined, posed challenges to all religious traditions bound to a concept of divine revelation. European Jewry responded to the crisis by fashioning explanatory historical models by which the contemporary circumstances could be faced without loss of continuity with the past. As we have suggested, the ancient division of halakhah and aggada, revived in eighteenth century polemics in Eastern Europe, became modalities of contact with secular modernity. The face of secular modernity turned sinister in the middle of the twentieth century, though that was less surprising to the halakhists than to those of the aggadic viewpoint. With annihilation as the indicated and seemingly inevitable destiny, dislocation appeared a veritable redemption; yet survival came for many at the cost of continuity. For one thing, Torah for many could no longer be read with the assurance of a benevolent sovereign over history; for another, the imperative to honor earlier generations translated into a project of historical preservation, and with that the domestication in Jewish scholarship of the historical-critical methods that had been deemed heretical a century before. A second barrier of isolation was not demographic but certainly was cultural: the ‘fence’ around Torah that preserved the privileged meaning of the narrative. Oral Torah in the form of written Talmud was an inheritance that needed neither sharing nor redefinition; intrinsically fluid, it sustained the dynamic enterprise of ongoing interpretation without being subject to the distractions of the textual questions being directed to the canonical narrative. Yet here too, as we have seen, both halakhic and aggadic approaches have been brought to bear on the Talmudic corpus, each in ways that address the predicament of the Jew in foreign and threatening terrain.

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Notes 1

2

3 4 5 6

7 8 9

10 11 12 13

14 15 16

Recent treatments of the interplay of written and oral transmission include Susan Niditch, Oral Word and Written Word: Ancient Israelite Literature (Louisville: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1996); and Martin S. Jaffee, ‘A Rabbinic Ontology of the Written and Spoken Word: On Discipleship, Transformative Knowledge, and the Living Texts of Oral Torah,’ JAAR 65 (1997) 525–49. Louise Pettibone Smith, ‘The Use of the Word hrwt in Isaiah, Chapters 1–39,’ American Journal of Semitic Languages and Literatures 46 (1929) 1–21; Gerald N. Bruns, ‘Canon and Power in the Hebrew Scriptures,’ Critical Inquiry 10 (1984) 462–80; Jacob Neusner, Torah: From Scroll to Symbol in Formative Judaism (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1985); Ze’ev W. Falk, ‘Jewish Religious Law in the Modern (And Postmodern) World,’ Journal of Law and Religion 11 (1994) 465–98. This line of questioning is ancient and almost constitutive of reflection on the nature of Judaism: see Ephraim E. Urbach, The Sages: Their Concepts and Beliefs, tr. Israel Abrahams (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1979) 286–314. ‘A Guide for Youth: Martin Buber,’ in Hannah Arendt, The Jewish Writings, ed. Jerome Kohn and Ron H. Feldman (New York: Schocken, 2007) 31–33, here: 31. The leading biography remains Maurice Friedman, Martin Buber’s Life and Work, 3 vols. (New York: Dutton, 1981–83); shorter studies have tended to focus on his contribution to existentialism, e.g. HJP 803–07. See Paul Tillich, ‘Martin Buber and Christian Thought: His Threefold Contribution to Protestantism,’ Commentary 5 (1948) 515–21, and ‘Jewish Influences on Contemporary Christian Theology,’ Cross Currents 2/3 (1952) 38–42. Buber is also the only non-Christian subject of one of the introductions to ‘thinkers that have shaped Christian theology in our time,’ namely the Evangelical ‘Makers of the Modern Theological Mind’ series (Stephen M. Panko, Martin Buber [Waco, Texas: Word Books, 1976]). Martin Buber, On Judaism, ed. Nahum N. Glatzer (New York: Schocken Books, 1967) 3–4. On Judaism, 82. Martin Buber, The Legend of the Baal-Shem (1907), tr. Maurice Friedman (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995); Hasidism and Modern Man, tr. Maurice Friedman (New York: Harper & Row, 1958), in which Part 4 is ‘The Way of Man according to the Teachings of Hasidism,’ often printed separately, e.g. New York: Citadel Press, 1966. Buber saw in Hasidism an urgently needed revival movement within Judaism; see Laurence J. Silberstein, Martin Buber’s Social and Religious Thought: Alienation and the Quest for Meaning (New York: New York University Press, 1989) 43–70. Martin Buber, ‘The Word that is Spoken,’ in The Knowledge of Man: Selected Essays, ed. Maurice Friedman and Alan Udoff (Amherst, NY: Humanity Books, 1998) 100–10. Martin Buber, ‘The Man of Today and the Jewish Bible,’ in On The Bible: Eighteen Studies by Martin Buber, ed. Nahum M. Glatzer (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2000) 7. Buber, ‘The Man of Today,’ 12–13. Heschel was the third of the name, his predecessors being the Rebbes of Apt and Zinkov; for the family background see Edward K. Kaplan and Samuel H. Dresner, Abraham Joshua Heschel: Prophetic Witness (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998) 4–36. Abraham Joshua Heschel, The Ineffable Name of God: Man, tr. Morton M. Leifman (New York: Continuum, 2004). Kaplan and Dresner, Abraham Joshua Heschel, 305–307. Abraham Joshua Heschel, Heavenly Torah as Refracted through the Generations, ed. & tr. by Gordon Tucker and Leonard Levin (New York: Continuum, 2005).

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17 The term ‘Duties of the Heart’ (which Heschel first uses at Torah, p. 20) alludes to the work of that name (twbblh twbwx trwt) by Bachya ben Joseph ibn Paquda (eleventh century), one of the ethical and spiritual classics of medieval Judaism. 18 This style, associated more with literature than constructive theology, is ubiquitous in the Eastern European milieu. See, e.g., Frances Hernandez, ‘Isaac Bashevis Singer and the Yiddish Literary Tradition,’ Bulletin of the Rocky Mountain Modern Language Association 25 (1971) 122–26. 19 See Nathan Rotenstreich, ‘On Prophetic Consciousness,’ JR 54 (1974) 185–98. 20 Abraham [Joshua] Heschel, Das prophetische Bewußtsein (Berlin: Buchdruckerei Michel, [1935]); before this work found its mature form in The Prophets, Heschel ventured into the prophetic discourse of medieval Jewish philosophers: see his Prophetic Inspiration after the Prophets: Maimonides and Other Medieval Authorities, ed. Morris M. Faierstein (Hoboken, NJ: Ktav, 1996). The Continental development of this line of thought is not to be confused with earlier or contemporary AngloAmerican parallels, such as the discussion of prophetic consciousness by William Ernest Hocking, The Meaning of God in Human Experience: A Philosophic Study of Religion (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1912) 485–514, esp. 499–508. The relation of the two schools of thought has yet to be clarified. 21 Heschel, Das prophetische Bewußtsein, 8–15, 97–119. 22 Martin Buber, The Prophetic Faith (New York: Harper, 1960) 234. 23 Martin Buber, Moses: The Revelation and the Covenant (New York: Harper, 1958) 59. 24 The thought and personality of the post-war Heschel are captured eloquently by Maurice Friedman, Abraham Joshua Heschel & Elie Wiesel: You Are My Witnesses (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1987) 3–88. 25 Abraham J. Heschel, The Prophets (New York: Harper & Row, 1962) xiii. 26 Brevard Childs, among the most influential historical-critical biblical interpreters, registers his discontent in a review at JBL 82 (1963) 328–30. 27 Heschel, The Prophets, xiii. 28 Heschel, The Prophets, 307–23. 29 A collection of his articles that forms a commentary of sorts on post-war Judaism is The Insecurity of Freedom: Essays on Human Existence (Philadelphia: JPS, 1966) especially ch. 9, ‘The Confusion of Good and Evil’ (127–49) and ch. 10, ‘Sacred Image of Man’ (150–67). 30 Kaarle S. Laurila, ‘In Memory of Max Dessoir,’ Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 6 (1947) 105–07 describes Dessoir’s formative roles in the disciplines of psychology and aesthetics. Dessoir was also one of the examiners of Soloveitchik’s doctoral dissertation. 31 For example, his articles ‘The Quest for Certainty in Saadia’s Philosophy,’ JQR n.s. 33 (1943) 265–313 and ‘Reason and Revelation in Saadia’s Philosophy,’ JQR n.s. 34 (1944) 391–408. 32 Abraham Joshua Heschel, Man is Not Alone: A Philosophy of Religion (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1951) 11–17. The title itself is a consolation attributed to the Baal Shem Tov (Elie Wiesel, Souls on Fire: Portraits and Legends of Hasidic Masters [New York: Simon and Schuster, 1972] 41). 33 Heschel, Man Is Not Alone, 198. 34 Heschel, Man Is Not Alone, 199. 35 Hsechel, Man Is Not Alone, 165. 36 Heschel, Man Is Not Alone, 165; italics his. 37 George A. Lindbeck, The Nature of Doctrine: Religion and Theology in a Postliberal Age (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1984). 38 Paul Ricoeur, The Symbolism of Evil (Boston: Beacon Press, 1969) 352. For discussion of this neo-pre-critical mode, see Mark I. Wallace, The Second Naiveté: Barth, Ricoeur, and the New Yale Theology (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 1990). 39 Dov being the Hebrew for ‘bear,’ many of his works in English have the middle initial B.

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40 Josef Solowiejczyk, Das reine Denken und die Seinskonstituierung bei Hermann Cohen, PhD dissertation, Berlin, 1930 (reprinted South Deerfield, MA: Schoen Books, 2005) 52–57, 110. 41 Jeffrey S. Gurock, The Men and Women of Yeshiva: Higher Education, Orthodoxy, and American Judaism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988) 130–33. A sympathetic assessment of his work is David Hartman, Love and Terror in the God Encounter: The Theological Legacy of Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik (Woodstock, VT: Jewish Lights, 2001). 42 Soloveitchik’s facility with both the Talmudic and philosophical idioms is illustrated by Shubert Spero, ‘Rabbi Joseph Dov Soloveitchik and Belief in God,’ MJ 19 (1999) 1–20; for a close reading of Halakhic Man see now Dov Schwartz, Religion or Halakha: The Philosophy of Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik, tr. Batya Stein, Supplements to The Journal of Jewish Thought and Philosophy, vol. 1 (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 2007). 43 Joseph B. Soloveitchik, Halakhic Man, tr. Lawrence Kaplan (Philadelphia: JPS, 1983) 8–11. The distinction can be traced to the work of a student of Soloveitchik’s grandfather, the poet Haim Nahman Bialik (1873–1934; see the latter’s Revealment and Concealment [Jerusalem: Ibis, 2000]); and, on the polarity as structural components of a strand of Jewish thought, Moshe Halbertal, Concealment and Revelation: Esotericism in Jewish Thought and Its Philosophical Implications, tr. Jackie Feldman (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007). 44 The term homo religiosus is most commonly associated with Mircea Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion, tr. Willard R. Trask (San Diego and New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1959) 162–67; for elucidation see Douglas Allen, ‘Mircea Eliade’s Phenomenological Analysis of Religious Experience,’ JR 52 (1972) 170–86. Eliade’s concept is linked with Tillich’s thought (and by association with theistic existentialism) by Kenneth Hamilton, ‘Homo Religiosus and Historical Faith,’ JBR 33 (1965) 213–22; and the response by David L. Miller, ‘Homo Religiosus and the Death of God,’ JBR 34 (1966) 305–15. 45 Soloveitchik, Halakhic Man, 78. 46 Halakhic Man, 14–15. 47 See Aviezer Ravitzky, ‘Rabbi J. B. Soloveitchik on Human Knowledge: Between Maimonidean and Neo-Kantian Philosophy,’ MJ 62 (1986) 157–88; here: 159. 48 Halakhic Man, 41. 49 Halakhic Man, 23. 50 David Singer and Moshe Sokol, ‘Joseph Soloveitchik: Lonely Man of Faith,’ MJ 2 (1982) 227–72, esp. 263–67. 51 Halakhic Man, 33. 52 Halakhic Man, 40. Soloveitchik’s denial of dualism has been seen as a break with his predecessors’ tradition; see Allan Nadler, ‘Soloveitchik’s Halakhic Man: Not A “Mithnagged,”’ MJ 13 (1993) 119–47. 53 Halakhic Man, 41. 54 Halakhic Man, 125. 55 Halakhic Man, 128. 56 For Soloveitchik on the prophet as ‘the most exalted creation of all’ see Halakhic Man, 128–31. On rising beyond material nature see especially 134: ‘The concept of creation sheds a clear light on the fundamental principle of choice and free will. This principle expresses itself on two levels: (1) man is free to create himself as a man of God; he has the ability to shatter the iron bars of universality and strict causality that imprison him qua man as a random example of the species; (2) this man of God, fashioned and created by man himself, having shattered that structured lawfulness governing the species, is no longer under its dominion and need not heed its dictates. He exists in his own private domain; he lives a free, autonomous, individual, and unique existence.’ 57 Ravitzky, 179–80. 58 Joseph B. Soloveitchik, The Lonely Man of Faith (New York: Doubleday, 2006) 7. The work originally appeared in the journal Tradition (Summer 1965).

96 59 60 61 62 63 64

65 66 67 68 69

70 71 72

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Exile and Restoration in Jewish Thought Lonely Man of Faith, 6. Lonely Man of Faith, 10–11. Lonely Man of Faith, 17, 18. Lonely Man of Faith, 21, 22. Lonely Man of Faith, 40. Lonely Man of Faith, 79–80: ‘The Halakhah believes that there is only one world – not divisible into secular and hallowed sectors – which can either plunge into ugliness and hatefulness, or be roused to meaningful, redeeming activity, gathering up all latent powers into a state of holiness. Accordingly, the task of covenantal man is to be engaged not in dialectical surging forward and retreating, but in uniting the two communities into one community where man is both the creative, free agent, and the obedient servant of God.’ Lonely Man of Faith, 99–100. Likewise, Soloveitchik’s halakhic individual is a synthesis of intellectual and religious dimensions; see David Singer and Moshe Sokol, ‘Joseph Soloveitchik: Lonely Man of Faith,’ MJ 2 (1982) 227–72, on this point p. 239. The best statement of Levinas’s orientation is his own ‘Signature,’ found in Emmanuel Levinas, Difficult Freedom: Essays on Judaism, tr. Seán Hand (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997) 291–95. Kees Waaijman, ‘The Hermeneutics of Emmanuel Levinas,’ StSpir 11 (2001) 71–125. Levinas, Difficult Freedom, 26. Catherine Chalier, ‘Levinas and the Talmud,’ in The Cambridge Companion to Levinas, ed. Simon Critchley and Robert Bernasconi (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002) 100–18; Michael Purcell, Levinas and Theology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006) 34–37. Occasionally he comments on the European inability to grasp the particularity of Jewish attitudes to truth (for example at Nine Talmudic Readings, tr. Annette Aronowicz [Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990] 46). Levinas, Nine Talmudic Readings, 15–17. Jill Robbins, Altered Reading: Levinas and Literature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999); for somewhat broader context, see Rob Shields, ‘Meeting or MisMeeting? The Dialogical Challenge to Verstehen,’ British Journal of Sociology 47 (1996) 275–94. Emmanuel Levinas, Beyond the Verse: Talmudic Readings and Lectures, tr. Gary D. Mole (London: Athlone Press, 1994) 18, 20, 22–23.

Chapter 6

RELATION

SUBJECTIVITY Individuals present difficulties, even apart from interpersonal relations. Ever since Descartes’s time the only sure starting-point for understanding was assumed to be the thinking self; the Empiricist tradition followed suit with modifications; and the Kantian a priori solidified the ‘Copernican turn.’ Individualism has rightly been called ‘the essence of modernity,’ and the subject has become the unit by which one comprehends agency.1 It is not a straight line that runs from Kant to the dawn of phenomenology, since Transcendental Idealism also has its historical and methodological startingpoint in the experience of the self.2 Like it or not, individual selfhood had an unshakeable claim upon the center of modern philosophical thought. There was much to like, and the development of liberal theology in the nineteenth century bears witness to the dogmatic potential in locating piety in the individual. The concept of feeling (Gefühl) allowed Protestant theologians to construct dogmatic systems from the inside out, using personal experience rather than received tradition as the source of religious truth.3 Incurring debts to Platonic theories of intuition, these thinkers isolated the ‘religious’ from modern attacks upon claims of the sacred character of revelation and tradition.4 Faith, like its traditional object, had been reincarnated in human form. There was a lot not to like as well, especially from the Jewish perspective. True, intuition had enjoyed a privileged place in the tradition, aided by mystical movements and diasporic conditions. But intuitive perception had always been tacitly linked to a two-sided realism, a conviction that God’s actuality could be apprehended (and was not merely a projection of human ideals), and that the divine will would be realized in the Covenant. Hence, to this second point, collectivity was never absent from the individual Jew’s sense of self: identity was defined by participation in the covenantal unity. While one of the foundations of Western social thought was Aristotle’s definition of the human as a ‘political animal,’ Jewish philosophical anthropology rested just as firmly on the notion that the Jew was a covenantal one: a person shaped by participation in an enduring bond with the deity.5 As a result, the experience of oneness with Israel conditioned all other understanding and awareness.

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CONFRONTING ‘YOU’ Ludwig Feuerbach (1804–72), today best known for his critique of Idealism and as a bridge between Hegel and Marx,6 was an influential silent partner in the development of relational thought. As a religious thinker, Feuerbach is more the heir of the Hegelian legacy than the forerunner of Marx.7 Along with his contemporaries animated by the political efforts to unite the evangelical churches in Germany, Feuerbach identified subjectivity as the locus of religious experience, in contrast to the confessional orthodoxy that sought to preserve the unique character of scripture as divine revelation. Although the union initiative of 1817 was unsuccessful in the long run, the attempt to consolidate Lutheran and Reformed churches was a distinctly modern venture: an adaptation both to biblical scholarship and the Kantian turn in epistemology.8 Feuerbach’s critique of religion and Hegelianism precipitated a countercritique in a line of thought that synthesized the anthropological materialism with an all-embracing Other. It was Martin Buber, introduced at an early age to the Young Hegelians and their critics, who adapted Feuerbach’s view that conceptions of God are projections of the human imagination. For Buber, as for Feuerbach, immediate experience is the starting-point of all conceptions of identity.9 But in Buber’s work, self-consciousness is intrinsically relational: one understands oneself fully only within a matrix of relationships. Hence all persons are simultaneously unique and interconnected. Building again on the sense of alienation common to a culture in which the ‘I-it’ relation dominates, in I and Thou Buber identifies the world of the spirit as a realm of reciprocal relations, each subject acknowledging the subjectivity or ‘Thou-ness’ of the other.10 Causal relationships knowable in the objective realm will always have a two-fold aspect: cause and effect on the one hand, material event and scientific understanding on the other; yet these have no force in the world of relation. In Buber’s words, ‘Here [sc. relation] man is assured of the freedom both of his being and of Being. Only he who knows relation and knows about the presence of the Thou is capable of decision. He who decides is free, for he has approached the Face.’11 For God to be the eternal Thou means, for Buber, the coalescence of subjectivity with intersubjectivity; the transcendence of separation both among persons and between the human and God.12 ‘To step into pure relation is not to disregard everything but to see everything in the Thou, not to renounce the world but to establish it on its true basis. To look away from the world, or to stare at it, does not help a man to reach God; but he who sees the world in Him stands in His presence.’13 God is approached phenomenologically through relations with the other, as well as the means by which the ‘other’ can properly be understood as the extension of the self and no longer as separate from the meaningful life.14 I and Thou is a remarkable text: brief and composed in a seemingly random aphoristic style, it is one of those books one reads more slowly

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rather than more quickly each time, for there is more beneath the surface than the simple prose suggests. Organized in three parts, Buber’s exposition progresses from the realm of the ‘it’ to that of the ‘you’ and thence to the Eternal You. The language is awkward, perhaps more palatable in German which is more tolerant of compounds and neologisms, but the dialectic is too important to be undermined by stylistic abnormalities. In some ways the jarring effect of the ‘it’ and ‘you’ language is a salutary jolt for readers complacent in their experience of the world around them. Without being an explicit critique of positivism, Buber’s depiction of the ‘it’ relationship conveys a clear message about reductive tendencies in academic social science. Understanding persons according to material categories, whether political, cultural, or religious, is to regard each person as a representative of a given group and then subject that group to objective analysis: an enterprise that threatens both individuality and the creativity that differentiates humans from all other observable things. For Buber, humanity simply cannot be merely another object of rational investigation. To view another person as an ‘it’ is to fail to know the person. (And it signals a failure to recognize that each subject is a potential ‘it,’ or object, to others.) The remedy for such isolation is dialogue; and this is a point of emphasis throughout Buber’s work.15 One can appreciate – that is, both understand and value – another individual only by recognizing that oneself and the other are both subjects, and that meaning emerges in the relationship between and among subjects rather than between subject and object. In Buber’s terminology this means that the other person is seen as a ‘you’ rather than an ‘it’: with the pronoun signaling equality and reciprocity. 16 In the ‘I–You’ relationship, each person engages the other in a mutuality resulting in a single unit formed from two otherwise distinct individuals.17 Not only is there a personal relationship, qualitatively different from all relations we have with the rest of the world, but it is an unusually intimate one. In German, ‘Du’ is a pronoun used only in addressing family members, close friends – and God. Hence regarding all persons on a ‘Du’ basis signifies more than recognizing their humanity; it reflects a belief in a common bond more intimate than that found in formal social relations.18 Buber’s concept of the I–You relationship among persons is already anchored in experience, for we all have ‘Du’ relations in our lives and would probably consider life rather meaningless without them. From a developmental perspective this is fairly obvious: the infant instinctively bonds with those nearest, with a gradation of relationships emerging only with the formation of personality. In adulthood it is the other way around, with formality preceding informality. The bold move for Buber is in projecting that ‘Du’ relationship onto God, for in so doing he is asserting that intimacy is the character of the divine–human relationship.19 Beyond that and even bolder is the notion that God, the ‘eternal you,’ is both the sum total of all I–You relationships and a source of meaningful relationship

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transcending them all.20 One interpreter of I and Thou goes so far as to apply a Christian notion and say that ‘The meeting takes place through grace.’21 Buber’s concept of the Eternal You is either a systematic tour de force or dreadfully confused, depending on what we assume theologically. It is bound to disappoint those who insist on the absolute qualitative ‘otherness’ of the divine being and who accordingly deny any correspondence between human relationships and authentic piety. Fierce debates were occurring within Christian dogmatics when Buber was writing I and Thou, with Karl Barth and other Neo-Orthodox theologians arguing that the divine kingdom is the incomprehensible counterpart, rather than the inevitable fulfillment, of human attempts to conceive and realize God’s plan for humanity. Paul Tillich’s assessment of Buber’s work merits mention: ‘An interpretation of religion is existential if it emphasizes the two-way character of every genuine religious experience: the involvement of the whole man in the religious situation, and the impossibility of having God outside this situation.’22 For Buber, as for Tillich, the paradox prevails because linear rationality falls short of its intended goals. ISRAEL: THE CONCEPT The name Israel, as we know, calls forth a range of meanings so broad as to thwart most attempts at definition. Not only does the name serve for a single individual (Jacob) and a collective people, it also represents a kingdom autonomous for a mere two centuries, with Shechem rather than Jerusalem as its capital, and Phoenicia and Samaria as dynastic and military allies.23 For the people to embrace the name Israel as a symbol of solidarity and strength adds irony to ambiguity. The persistence into modernity of this name for unified Jewry transforms the irony into a grim appropriateness. According to what Husserl referred to as the ‘natural attitude,’ the Diaspora effectively nullified the concept of a people Israel, and successive waves of oppression sought merely to complete the task begun by the Romans. Intentionally, on the other hand, Israel remained a unified people, a single virtual person in one-on-one relation with the deity. The reality of an invisible sovereign, both cosmological and particular, is a constant of Jewish experience, and of course a feature shared with theism as generally understood. Judaism, however, sustains this relationship as an abstraction on the human side, since there is no tangible organ of unity and centralization beside the Temple. Diasporic ‘Israel’ as a single body is the collective will of scattered persons, an intentional unity actualized in spite of a social disunity that renders any material unity of persons impossible. There is no point in trying to settle the question whether the community precedes the relation to God, or the other way around. Hermeneutically the community is prior; dogmatically, it is God who creates the people. The

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reciprocity with God that operates in the sacrificial Temple setting is mirrored in the collective intentionality that sustains the covenantal reality against both the social atomism of positivism and the full absorption of particulars into idealism. The more devoted the people are to the unity of the covenant, the more evident will be the sensation of participation in something divine. Historians of Jewish thought have tended to locate the beginnings of relational ethics in those strains of secular thought that emphasized the social aspect of experience. Thinkers like Mendelssohn received and participated in this line of thought, and some of their contributions were received into the mainstream gentile intellectual tradition. But equality of persons, still largely a utopian fiction and the distant hope of only the most progressive, was far from becoming a reality in the grammar of social interaction. The obvious fact is that cultural identities continued to dominate the interpersonal realm. That some of these identities are idiosyncratic will come as no surprise. It is a commonplace of modern history that national cultures are constructed in deep and wide-ranging ways: much of ‘medieval Europe,’ we are told, was an invention of nineteenth- and twentieth-century nationalists.24 And as we have seen, ‘Israel’ in the Diaspora before Emancipation was an ideal rather than the reality described in Torah. European Jewry wore modernization differently from gentile culture. For one thing, Emancipation transformed this people from being a nation in exile to being a part of the fabric of European nation-states. For another, the doctrine of historical progress that had been part and parcel of the secularization of the European social order was a strong counterpoint to the nostalgia for Zion at the heart of Jewish hopes during prolonged and often harsh marginalization. Third, the transformation from civil bondage to relative freedom, a redemption as suggested by the use of the term ‘emancipation,’ evoked the Exodus event strongly enough to tempt many Jews to feel they had entered a new Canaan with the enfranchisement of a hitherto subordinate, if not technically servile, populace. Few events pitted the heart and the head of European Jewry against each other as much as the possibility of assimilation into the social and economic mainstream. The ‘head’ in this instance was the awareness of material conditions that resulted from a Christendom losing its religious dominance. If material adversity had been the result of an intolerant church, or its control of the secular rulers, then the liberties granted by the secular authorities should for very good reasons have been welcomed. In the first century the Jews had been at the mercy of the Roman Empire, not the Roman Church. There was little doubt that if the latter was losing its hold on secular empires, so much the better. The ‘heart’ with which this sense of relief was at cross-purposes was the piety of the people, until then never forcibly separated from everyday life. Liturgy, as we have indicated, was Janus-faced, looking forward and backward to a single normative condition. In that perspective, there is only

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one Canaan and only one Zion. Resolving the duality of head and heart called for concentrated effort in new directions. INTUITING REDEMPTION At the beginning of the twentieth century the term ‘New Thinking’ began to appear, signaling a break with earlier tradition.25 The term smacks of chutzpa and would be chutzpicious indeed from someone other than Franz Rosenzweig (1886–1929), one of the most genuinely creative thinkers of his epoch. Original this work certainly was; but how he understood the novelty of the New Thinking is worth noting. Rosenzweig is a figure who looms large in the history of twentieth-century thought, although he is less well known than some of his contemporaries, in part surely because his work in several senses is exceedingly difficult.26 Not a professional academic, he was nevertheless trained in philosophy (as well as in medicine and law) and in 1920 became director of the Free Jewish House of Study (Freies Jüdisches Lehrhaus) in Frankfurt, an institution emblematic of the maturity of the assimilated Jewish intelligentsia in Germany.27 Alongside this somewhat conventional professional trajectory run two events that shaped his work: his decision to commit to traditional Jewish observance; and his experience as a medic and later as an officer in the German Army on the Balkan front during World War I. It was during his deployment that he wrote The Star of Redemption (1921); shortly after completing it he began to show the symptoms of Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis; and in less than a decade, despite progressive paralysis, he wrote essays on medieval and contemporary Jewish thinkers, collaborated with Buber on a translation of the Bible into German, and contributed papers on a wide range of Judaic topics to various journals. Declared a rabbi (by Leo Baeck) in 1923, Rosenzweig maintained a prolific correspondence and productivity despite fever, pneumonia, and the inability to speak resulting from his ALS, from which he died at age 42.28 In a supplementary essay on the Star of Redemption, Rosenzweig tries to clarify his stance as a philosopher, in part by reflecting on the philosophical enterprise itself. He likens the philosophical mode with poetry, but he is not replacing reason with irrationality. Rather, he claims to be describing a totality in which the aesthetic plays a part, and not merely a secondary one alongside the logical. The New Thinking, as Rosenzweig conceives it, is lived theory, not the metaphysical speculation of earlier (for him, pre-Hegelian) eras.29 Rosenzweig contrasts the speculative past with ‘experiential philosophy,’ a term to be used with care lest it slip into a form of privileging experience over thought. Instead, Rosenzweig means thinking as conditioned by experience – one’s own, that is.30 In the essay Rosenzweig indicates that this New Thinking is not his alone, nor is it something particular to Jewish philosophers. In point of fact, it is far

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from certain that Rosenzweig conceived the Star as a self-consciously Jewish work, even though he clearly executed it as such. His 1917 letter to his cousin Rudolf Ehrenberg, which has been seen as the seed of the larger work, is more about revelation and subjectivity than about Torah and Jewish identity. (Ehrenberg had already converted to Christianity and it was his example that led Rosenzweig almost to do so as well.) This letter-essay is the most Hegelian of Rosenzweig’s writings; although his PhD had been on Hegel’s political thought, the influence of the Phenomenology is unmistakable in this piece. (The Star itself is more restrained in its Hegelianism.) Rosenzweig defined the relation of divine and material in a strikingly new way, construing revelation phenomenologically rather than as a positive condition (whether textual or historical) for a specific cultural identity. The young Rosenzweig criticized the early Buber for substituting expectation of a future Kingdom with a present longing for unity as the essence of the Jewish people.31 Yet in acknowledging that the impetus toward unity is the defining spirit of Judaism, Rosenzweig confronts the challenge of reconciling present duality with ultimate unity. In place of relation, Rosenzweig locates the possibility of unity within time, associating estrangement with awareness of mortality. ‘From death, it is from the fear of death that all cognition of the All begins.’ The unsettling inevitability of death is for Rosenzweig the negation that implies a contrasting affirmation, its harsh finitude meaningful only against the backdrop of eternity. Terms for absoluteness (All, Infinite Being, the One, etc.) become dialectical counterparts to instances of limitation, articulating a tension that is resolved in the absorption of the finite into the eternal One. Redemption for Rosenzweig is resolution (Erlösung), symbolized in the Yom Kippur liturgy and actualized in the experience of atonement. Redemption is the realization of wholeness both for the individual Jew and for Jewry collectively, an anticipation of an eschatological unity of which Judaism is the symbol within historical time. Rosenzweig shares obvious affinities with Buber, his closest collaborator, and there are provocative similarities with aspects of Heschel’s work; but there are also traces of Spinoza’s influence on his thought. First, the role of prophecy is critical in the work of these thinkers, each of whom understands it in a way different from the traditional conception. For Spinoza, the prophetic is the medium for that scientia intuitiva that is able to free the individual by restraining obstacles to the self-preserving conatus. Spinoza’s prophetic strain expresses the creative energy of the world and binds the individual to the intentionality of the all-encompassing unity.32 Spinoza identifies prophecy with revelation and calls it the ‘sure knowledge revealed by God to man.’ In Buber, the prophetic element mediates the encounter with the other and transcends it by forging an intuited unity from an objective duality. For Heschel, prophecy serves as the channel of an affective bond between God and humans, one that always surpasses, and sometimes confounds, ordinary discourse. And Rosenzweig’s concentration on a momentum impelled by and directed to a redemptive kingdom or ‘fire’ makes him a distinctly prophetic figure.

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Second, the supra-rational epistemology advanced by these thinkers allows for the development of a theme not always evident in other trajectories of modern discourse, namely the driving power of divine love in the phenomenology of Jewish experience. Banishment, cultural dislocation, wasting disease and persecution on a horrific scale present insuperable challenges to more rational forms of religiosity, and for any of these thinkers, nihilism might well have been the indicated conclusion to any search for meaning. That it was not, and that a new affirmation was articulated from the ashes of meaninglessness, speaks to a degree of openness toward what secular modernity might only regard as absurd. The construction of identity is never far from the formation of bonds with others; indeed individuality and participation are mutually entailed. The interdependence of the personal and the collective is especially pronounced in Judaism, for at least two reasons. The first is the mythical (if not historical) genetic connection all Jews hold by descent from Abraham and by bearing in common the name of his grandson, Israel.33 The second is the absence of any visible unity without a geographic center. Thus throughout the Dispersion Jews are both unified and scattered, the historical separation being a taunt to the religious ideal of unity. The view that Israel as a people was bound to God first and foremost, with this relationship creating a particular bond among Jews wherever they might be, gave unity when Jews worshipped and studied, a spiritual solidarity felt to be stronger than material fragmentation. The resulting sense of ‘vertical’ and ‘horizontal’ cohesiveness suggested an immaterial yet ever-present aspect of Jewish identity that set relations among Jews on a separate plane from relations with the larger environment. Such a feeling of unity was the epitome of intentionality, for it transcended reason and sense experience alike. In an era in which positivism dominated the sciences, assertions of the reality of the intangible were a predictably heterodox reaction. Among the defenses of the immaterial were arguments for a totalistic worldview in which moral conduct was guided by an intuited sense of an all-inclusive whole. And intuition thus gained a prominence in Western thought unequalled since the days of Plato’s Academy. RELATIONAL REALISM Jean-Paul Sartre credited Emmanuel Levinas with having introduced Husserl to French readers, which is true in one sense (Levinas translated Husserl’s Cartesian Meditations) and perhaps only a half-truth in another, for Levinas’s engagement with Husserl is work of the highest originality and just as Levinasian as it is Husserlian, insofar as it illuminates Levinas’s own thinking. In his analysis of the Husserlian concept of intuition, Levinas offers an explanation of the function of consciousness in his own thought. Consciousness, for Levinas, comes with its own baggage: more eloquently, ‘In the background of conscious life there is a multitude of cogitations. This background is not

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a vagueness beyond the reaches of analysis, a sort of fog within consciousness; it is a field already differentiated. … One can distinguish in it various types of acts: acts of belief (the drawing of a genuine belief, a belief that precedes knowledge, etc.), of pleasure or displeasure, of desire, etc.’ 34 Thus consciousness does not exist in a vacuum; rather, it is shaped by the desires and judgments on the horizon of perception. Yet Levinas is one with Husserl in calling intentionality ‘the very mode of existence of consciousness’: not a property of consciousness, but the way consciousness exists as such.35 Levinas is an ethicist as well as a phenomenologist: in fact the two strands of thought are one in his work. When Levinas declares that ‘ethics is first philosophy,’ he offers an example of the vexatious playfulness with terms that draws the reader into a Levinasian relationship in order to grasp his idea. The term philosophia prima, Aristotelian in origin and designating the necessary prolegomena for any philosophical construction, was used by Wolff and Baumgarten to specify ontology.36 It is thus first in being prior to all other sciences and having as its domain the first causes of all things.37 With the turn toward the subject that marked the Kantian revolution, ‘being’ and thus the understanding of being (ontology) were construed anew, along phenomenological rather than metaphysical lines. As such, what ‘is’ becomes shorthand for ‘what is given’ to experience. Husserl used the term ‘first philosophy’ for phenomenology, and Levinas, a Husserlian par excellence, elucidates rather than negates this understanding in his claim to the primacy of ethics.38 As to ‘ethics,’ dominant conceptions likewise lose their utility. If what is given to experience is something in relation to oneself, then all cognition and activity take place relationally, within the binary givenness of self and other. Relational selfhood being the irreducible given of experience, and humans being intrinsically intentional (in the Husserlian sense), determining the relation of self to other is the necessary precondition of both self-knowledge and rational action. Ethics undergoes a shift in meaning with Levinas, from rational reflection on norms of conduct to a lived awareness of intersubjectivity. Conventional ethicists may have difficulty grasping Levinas because they are looking for an ‘ought’ in a body of work that leads with the ‘is.’39 Subjectivity, as intuitive consciousness, is intrinsically relational: that is to say, the ‘I’ is completed in the ‘we.’ The normative constraint then becomes the best interest of the extended subject, the relation itself. Herein lurks a demanding point, for each individual is the sole possessor of an individuated consciousness, always an ‘I’ because the ‘we’ does not have its own understanding or intention. The subject, however, is consciously never alone, since all actions involve an other; hence deliberation necessarily takes the other into account – as another subject. (In Buber’s terminology, as an alternate ‘I’ instead of as a ‘thou’ and certainly not as an ‘it.’) The term Levinas uses for this consciousness of the other is ‘alterity.’40 The term captures what Buber recognized and something to be found in other writers of the era: each self is another self’s other.41 Symmetrically, each other is also a self, with a moral claim upon me to be responsible – here

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Levinas means responding in kind, at the level of alternate selfhood – to that other. Echoing an insight into the core value of Judaism that was encapsulated in the Rabbinical period,42 alterity acts like a mirror to reflect the quality of one’s motivations and actions. Subjectivity, in Levinas’s words, is an ‘irreplaceable hostage’ in responsibility for another.43 Levinas moves beyond Buber in a way that complements rather than contradicts the mutuality of the I–Thou relationship. For Levinas, the other is not another intelligible self but an entirely different subject, one who is radically unknowable. That is to say, there is a depth dimension to the other’s alterity that demands distance rather than intimacy. What one encounters in an other is a ‘face,’ which represents both the whole person and an infinite mystery in which that person participates.44 Just as the biblical deity has no literal face but is nevertheless known personally, so does the human other – the face one sees – mask an unknowable connection to the infinite.45 Since a critical element in Levinas’s work is dialogue despite (or, better yet, because of) difference, we should recognize that two of the most profound forms of difference are those between the religious and the secular, and, for Levinas particularly, between the Jew and the non-Jew. This second duality is most revealing, since as a Jew Levinas participates in the community shaped by the triad of God–Torah–Israel and the tripartite hierarchy of nature–culture–supernature, both of which make him an ‘other’ to other religious communities and the secular positivists. The gap between insider and outsider perspectives cannot be resolved; recognition of difference is the only possible goal of mutual understanding. An outsider all his life (his family fled Lithuania in 1915), Levinas recognized that he himself was a stranger to those around him; and this selfawareness was a microcosmic Diaspora. Thus when Levinas calls ethics ‘first philosophy,’ he is not merely rearranging the relation of ontology to value theory, but announces a new ontology in which the reality of relation is the starting-point of all rationality. This is phenomenology at its most radical, in holding intuitive consciousness as the source of understanding. Yet it is also genuinely moral, insofar as it finds its realization in the duality of self and other. His ethical work may be labeled ‘relational realism,’ if one fancies such terms, in contrast to the moral realism of other ethical thinkers.46 In Emmanuel Levinas we have the irony of a thinker whose thought is fully appreciated by non-Jewish readers yet whose writing can only be completely understood once it is contextualized within Judaic patterns of thought. Levinas is not unique in this: Philo and Spinoza are his most notable forerunners. But Levinas’s philosophy has thus far escaped the opprobrium suffered by those predecessors: it has not been dismissed as antagonistic to the Jewish tradition. Shaped early on by contact with a circle of French thinkers that included the Christian existentialist Gabriel Marcel, the relation of one’s self to culturally different others was a focal point of his thought, and we should see in his work the question of relating one’s Jewish self to the non-Jewish other.47

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THE CRISIS OF CONTINUITY In the German parliamentary and presidential elections of 1932–33, the NSDAP came from behind by means of strategic alliances with leaders from other parties and electoral victories in minor regions such as Lippe. By the eighth Reichstag (March 1933), the National-Socialist German Workers’ Party held 288 of the 647 seats, but that was more than twice the 120 seats held by the Social Democrats, the second largest party, and three times more than the German Communist Party’s 81. The Weimar Constitution of 1919, with its explicit protection of all Germans, was replaced in the ‘legal revolution’ of early 1933, a series of enactments aimed at protecting the German people and their nation.48 As obvious as the political maneuvering of these decades was the fact that ‘German’ had acquired a new definition. The ethnic criteria for identification with the people (Volk) excluded Jews culturally; and the Nuremberg Laws of 1935 began a process of codifying subordinate status. By Kristallnacht in November 1938, Jews had been forced to surrender any property valued at more than 500 marks; their professional and commercial activities had been restricted – and in the case of lawyers and physicians, terminated; those without Jewish given names received ‘Israel’ and ‘Sarah’; and the Star of David and the rubber-stamped ‘J’ began to appear on clothing and passports. As has been suggested in earlier chapters, marginality had been sufficiently ingrained in the Jewish perspective of life in Diaspora that the loss of civil privileges vindicated suspicions that policies of toleration were insincere and destined to be overthrown. Transcending anything for which even the most pessimistic imagination could be prepared was the sequence of events that followed. By the time German and Nazi-occupied soil had absorbed the final remains of Hitler’s victims, the scattered remnant of European Jewry found its refuge not in hopes of divine protection but in the humanitarian initiatives of secular democracies – in most cases the work of private agencies rather than of governmental bodies. For many Jews, confidence in modernity had been shaken as badly as had trust in a protective deity. To a noticeable extent, political theory by Jewish thinkers during the second half of the twentieth century engaged moral questions within broader reflections on statecraft. Leftist tendencies among Jewish voters resist reduction to ethnic or economic categories but speak to a commitment to advocacy for the marginalized.49 Hannah Arendt, who sees the ascendancy of creatingproducing humanity as the product of Enlightenment modernity, affirms that life itself, impervious to doubt or qualification, is the greatest good.50 A decade earlier, her fellow exile Ernst Cassirer saw the rise of totalitarianism as evidence of the dominance of the mythic over the rational.51 Their Protestant contemporaries, perhaps from more comfortable familiarity with the doctrine of original sin, readily named the ruling spirits of totalitarian governments The Demonic.52

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Among the most controversial issues raised by thinkers in the post World War II decades has been whether the scale of destruction wrought in a single decade signals a qualitative shift in Jewish history. If it does, then the terms with which Israel (the people, not the state) understands its relation to the nonJewish world must be seen as fundamentally changed as a consequence of the workings of the Third Reich. There is no question that the direction of Jewish thought was altered by these events more than by any other since the destruction of the Second Temple; assessing that change has accordingly been the dominant, if not the constitutive, task of post-Holocaust Jewish thought.53 Adhering to meaningful symbols in the aftermath of the seemingly incomprehensible may be an impossible task; but to avoid the attempt would have threatened the continuity of Jewish thought itself. Discordant notes of divine sovereignty and divine justice had been sounded early in the Jewish tradition, and the incomprehensibility of God’s order was emphasized forcefully during times of turmoil. Despite a systematic aversion to paradox, discerning a providential will amid material evidence to the contrary was the motivating task throughout the medieval tradition, and recognizing the elusiveness of divine benevolence was a condition for philosophical inquiry.54 Earlier interpretive efforts to draw intelligibility and coherence from such books as Job and Ecclesiastes were poised to give way to sharing those characters’ exclamations of frustration (Job 6:2) and futility (Eccles. 1:2).55 The postwar crisis in Jewish thought is a testimony to the persistence of theism. Radical irrationality (the concept, not the experience) has meaning only alongside the foil of a rational order attributable to an omnipotent and just sovereign. Questions about the possibility of evil presuppose an overarching law against which specific instances of adversity can be assessed.56 Unlike naturalism, theism allows for the posing of questions, even those that have no answers. Unique in both magnitude and meaninglessness, the Holocaust defies conceptualization; and it is for this reason that Arthur Cohen retrieves a term applied by Rudolf Otto to the numinous: the tremendum, literally tremorinducing.57 In Cohen’s view, the Holocaust is ‘ultimate’ but not ‘final,’ a distinction that allows one to recognize the totality of the event without yielding to its intention. In his words, ultimacy demands that survivors and the bearers of their memory ‘reappraise [their] situation in its aftermath.’58 The task of theology, and of Jewish thought in particular, is as necessary and urgent as it is difficult.59 Out of a vast literature, two constructions call for particular attention. The first of these is the work of Richard Rubenstein, whose early work coincided with the ‘death of God’ phenomenon in late-1960s Christian thought.60 Understanding traditional faith as a means to make sense of history, Rubenstein saw an insuperable obstacle in the confrontation of Jewish covenantal identity and the mechanized carnage of the Nazi regime. In Rubenstein’s view, faith in God and the raw facts of Auschwitz were

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conceptually incompatible, indeed mutually exclusive. Trust in an orderly world ruled by a benevolent deity had failed; God had fallen silent.61 In a spirited essay originally written for Protestants in Germany, Rubenstein presents a relationship with Torah that he labels ‘Jewish atheism.’62 Defining community in social rather than devotional terms, Rubenstein sees the impossibility of traditional piety as the conditioning impulse toward a new Jewish model of community. ‘It is precisely the ultimate hopelessness and gratuity of our human situation which calls forth our strongest need for religious community. If all we have is each other, then assuredly we need each other more than ever.’63 Similarly, in a 1970 exegesis of the Book of Job, Rubenstein questions the adequacy of the Joban response to God as a model for Jewish piety in the wake of the death camps.64 Victims and survivors alike – the former unable to reflect on their fate, the latter too traumatized to articulate any sense of meaning in the events – have been hindered in ‘seeing anything Job-like in their World War II experience.’65 Rather, in contrast to Job, post-Holocaust humanity ‘faces the possibility that the God he accuses does not exist, that earth is merely the dumb witness to the succession of amoral passion, power, and violence we call the human adventure.’66 Removing the theistic element from Jewish historical consciousness augurs a crisis in religious orientation, one that precipitated controversy from a number of quarters. Steven Katz finds fault with the claim of qualitative uniqueness in the Holocaust that underlies the claim that traditional theology is inadequate in its wake, and sees in Rubenstein’s substitution of a cultural Judaism for the theological structure a return to a form of paganism.67 Zachary Braiterman has seen in Rubenstein’s work a corrosive element compromising the pious core of the cultural tradition.68 Rubenstein’s critics, while recognizing the force of his arguments, share the common conviction that Judaism without the sovereign deity is itself incomprehensible. The second approach to the threatened rupture of faith in a benevolent God is associated with Emil Fackenheim, whose work is a determined refusal to give in to despair over the meaninglessness of catastrophic events. Fackenheim is best known perhaps for his ‘614th Commandment,’ to refuse to grant ‘posthumous victories’ to Hitler by abandoning the pious tradition.69 A professional philosopher in the Hegelian mold, Fackenheim sees in the Holocaust a new negation of values and an object of horrified awe antithetical to the philosophers’ traditional – or ideal – state of wonder.70 Fackenheim’s work marks a new stage in philosophical literature by proceeding from a given assumption that Enlightenment confidence in moral order and rational society has been deflated by the organized inversion of civilized values. Fackenheim recognizes the internal coherence of the Nazidominated order; for him Auschwitz represents an ‘anti-world.’ 71 Unrestrained by other philosophers’ aversion to paradox, Fackenheim attributes the survival of Judaism to martyrdom, beginning with the Bar Kokhba revolt in the second century CE and continuing into his own day.72

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Resisting the term ‘system’ in keeping with his conviction that philosophical systematizing had been paralyzed by historical events, Fackenheim nevertheless constructs a conceptual edifice supported by two profoundly influential thinkers, Spinoza and Rosenzweig, both notably askew to the dominant tradition in their rejection of authorities. The inexplicability of the Holocaust leads Fackenheim to reject, in turn, the authority of reason itself, a faculty incapable of understanding a reality that nevertheless demands acknowledgment and response.73 Moreover, the incomprehensible reality demands resistance, resistance-after-the-fact, so to speak, on behalf of the victims who had been denied that power.74 Fackenheim’s response is drawn, paradoxically or not, from the rabbinic tradition and finds its expression in the term tikkun, a noun formed from the verb meaning ‘to straighten.’75 Laden with connotations both mystical and moral, Fackenheim applies the term to the mental resistance of the victims and proposes that it be the stance of post-Holocaust Jewry: ‘The Tikkun which for the post-Holocaust Jew is a moral necessity is a possibility because during the Holocaust itself a Jewish Tikkun was already actualized.’76 It became so because piety was not destroyed along with the victims, and the fact that there can be questions of Jewish identity after Auschwitz demands that there be Jewish answers to such questions. Fackenheim’s vision, presented as an imperative, is a Jewry that bears active witness to the faith that persisted despite what those millions endured. ‘The hope that died and is resurrected: such is the Jewish testimony to the nations today.’77 The emergence of this affirmation from the ashes of the camps, like Job’s in the whirlwind, articulates perhaps the only authentic response within the absolute gap between finite humanity and an incomprehensible deity.78

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Notes 1

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Peter McCormick, ‘The Concept of the Self in Political Thought,’ Canadian Journal of Political Science 12 (1979) 689–725 (here: p. 690); Michael Shapiro, ‘Charles Taylor’s Moral Subject,’ Political Theory 14 (1986) 311–24 (here: p. 312); for origins, Jerrold Seigel, The Idea of the Self: Thought and Experience in Western Europe since the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005) 111–38. Sebastian Rödl, Self-Consciousness (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007); for broader thematic context, Frederick C. Beiser, German Idealism: The Struggle against Subjectivism, 1781–1801 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002). Robert Williams, ‘Schleiermacher and Feuerbach on the Intentionality of Religious Consciousness,’ JR 53 (1973) 424–55; Julia A. Lamm, ‘The Early Philosophical Roots of Schleiermacher’s Notion of Gefühl, 1788–1794,’ HTR 87 (1994) 67–105; Louis Roy, ‘Consciousness according to Schleiermacher,’ JR 77 (1997) 217–32. See B. A. Gerrish, ‘Theology within the Limits of Piety Alone: Schleiermacher and Calvin’s Notion of God,’ The Old Protestantism and the New: Essays on the Reformation Heritage (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1982) 196–207; Claude Welch, Protestant Thought in the Nineteenth Century, vol. 1 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1972) 59–85. See Eugene B. Borowitz, Renewing the Covenant: A Theology for the Postmodern Jew (Philadelphia: JPS, 1991) 207–20 for an argument favoring covenant over ‘chosenness.’ G. N. G. Orsini, ‘Feuerbach’s Supposed Objection to Hegel,’ JHI 30 (1969) 85–90; N. Lobkowicz, ‘Karl Marx’s Attitude toward Religion,’ Review of Politics 26 (1964) 319–52 (esp. 321–24); Richard Comstock, ‘The Marxist Critique of Religion: A Persisting Ambiguity,’ JAAR 44 (1976) 327–42 (esp. 329–31); William J. Brazill, The Young Hegelians (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1970). For Feuerbach’s ambivalent relation to Hegel see Claude Welch, Protestant Thought in the Nineteenth Century, vol. 1 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1972) 170–77; also Walter Jaeschke, ‘Speculative and Anthropological Criticism of Religion: A Theological Orientation to Hegel and Feuerbach,’ JAAR 48 (1980) 345–64. For background on the Union, see Christopher Clark, ‘Confessional Policy and the Limits of State Action: Frederick William III and the Prussian Church Union 1817–40,’ HJ 39 (1996) 985–1004. The theoretical genesis of the subjective turn is elucidated by Jacqueline Mariña, ‘Schleiermacher on the Philosopher’s Stone: The Shaping of Schleiermacher’s Early Ethics by the Kantian Legacy,’ JR 79 (1999) 193–215. Ludwig Feuerbach, Das Wesen des Christentums (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1971) 54–55 (ch. 2), tr. George Eliot as The Essence of Christianity (New York: Harper, 1957) 14: ‘All certainties [Bestimmungen; Eliot: ‘attributes’] about divine essence [Wesen] are thus certainties [Bestimmungen] of human essence [Wesen].’ Martin Buber, I and Thou, tr. Roland Gregor Smith (1958; New York: Macmillan, 1987) 39–40, 51; tr. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1970) 89–90, 100–01. I and Thou, 51 Smith, 100–101 Kaufmann, who uses ‘countenance’ for Buber’s Angesicht (Ich und Du [Stuttgart: Reclam, 2006] 50). Maurice Friedman suggests that Buber expands a concept of intersubjectivity implicit in Husserl (‘Intersubjectivity in Husserl, Sartre, Heidegger, and Buber,’ Review of Existential Psychology and Psychiatry 1989 [1993] 63–80, esp. 70–72). I and Thou, 78–79 Smith, 127 Kaufmann. Maurice Friedman, ‘Dialectical Faith versus Dialogical Trust,’ The Eastern Buddhist, n.s. 4 (1971) 162–70, esp. 163. Buber’s work as a ‘philosopher of dialogue’ is the focus of most of the essays in Martin Buber and the Social Sciences, ed. Maurice Friedman (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996); see esp. Friedman’s own testimony, pp. 9–15. Nahum N. Glatzer, ‘Aspects of Martin Buber’s Thought,’ MJ 1 (1981) 1–16; W. Taylor

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Stevenson, ‘I–Thou and I–It: An Attempted Clarification of their Relationship,’ JR 43 (1963) 193–209; Lorenz Wachinger, Der Glaubensbegriff Martin Bubers, Beiträge zur Ökumenischen Theologie, 4 (Munich: Max Hueber, 1970) 71–84. Philip Wheelwright, ‘On the Meaning of “You”,’ Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association 40 (1966) 35–48. For background and parallels see Paul Popov, ‘On the Origin of Russian vy as a Form of Polite Address,’ Slavic and East European Journal 29 (1985) 330–37, esp. 335 n. 3; C. J. Wells, German: A Linguistic History to 1945 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985) 274–75. Stuart Charmé, ‘The Two I–Thou Relations in Martin Buber’s Philosophy,’ HTR 70 (1977) 161–73. See Maurice S. Friedman, ‘Symbol, Myth, and History in the Thought of Martin Buber,’ JR 34 (1954) 1–11; also Friedman, ‘Religious Symbolism and ‘Universal’ Religion,’ JR 38 (1958) 215–25, esp. 218–19. Paul Roubiczek, Existentialism: For and Against (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1964) 144. Paul Tillich, Theology of Culture, ed. Robert C. Kimball (London and New York: Oxford University Press, 1959) 189. The two thinkers have been proposed as guiding figures for Jewish–Christian dialogue: see, for example, David Novak, Talking with Christians: Musings of a Jewish Theologian (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2005) 89–107. See John H. Hayes and J. Maxwell Miller, Israelite and Judaean History (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1977) 381–434. See Norman F. Cantor, Inventing the Middle Ages: The Lives, Works, and Ideas of the Great Medievalists of the Twentieth Century (New York: W. Morrow, 1991). For extended background of this movement, see Werner J. Cahnman, ‘Schelling and the New Thinking of Judaism,’ PAAJR 48 (1981) 1–56, esp. 50–52 in which Hermann Cohen is named in the transmission of thought from Schelling to Rosenzweig. Peter Eli Gordon, ‘Franz Rosenzweig and the Philosophy of Jewish Existence,’ CCMJP 122–46 is a succinct and excellent introduction to his thought. He describes his mission at the Lehrhaus in several letters and essays: see Franz Rosenzweig, On Jewish Learning, ed. N. N. Glatzer (New York: Schocken, 1955; rpt. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2002). The standard biographical reference, invaluable as a source of otherwise inaccessible documents yet showing its age, is Nahum N. Glatzer, Franz Rosenzweig: His Life and Thought (1961; 3rd edn. with a valuable Foreword by Paul Mendes-Flohr, Indianapolis: Hackett, 1998). Barbara Galli, ‘“The New Thinking”: An Introduction,’ in Franz Rosenzweig’s ‘The New Thinking,’ tr. Alan Udoff and Barbara E. Galli (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1999) 1–41. See Arthur A. Cohen, ‘Franz Rosenzweig’s The Star of Redemption: An Inquiry into Its Psychological Origins,’ in An Arthur A. Cohen Reader, ed. David Stern and Paul Mendes-Flohr (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1998) 146–72; also Reiner Wiehl, ‘Experience in Rosenzweig’s New Thinking,’ in The Philosophy of Franz Rosenzweig, ed. Paul Mendes-Flohr (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1988) 42–68. ‘Atheistic Theology,’ in Philosophical and Theological Writings, tr. Paul W. Franks and Michael L. Morgan (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2000) 20. ‘Expresses’ here has the specific meaning found in the interpretation of Gilles Deleuze, Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza, tr. Martin Joughin (New York, Zone, 1990), whose insights deserve more serious consideration than they have heretofore received. See Jacob Neusner, ‘“Israel”: Judaism and Its Social Metaphors,’ JAAR 55 (1987) 331–61. Emmanuel Levinas, The Theory of Intuition in Husserl’s Phenomenology, tr. André Orianne (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1995) 20. Levinas, Theory of Intuition, 41.

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36 José Ferrater Mora, ‘On the Early History of “Ontology,”’ PPR 24 (1963) 36–47; Wolff’s Latin text with a German translation is available in Erste Philosophie oder Ontologie (§§ 1–78), ed. Dirk Effertz, PhB 569 (Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 2005). 37 Jean-Luc Marion, ‘The Other First Philosophy and the Question of Givenness,’ Critical Inquiry 25 (1999) 784–800. 38 Jeffner Allen, ‘What is Husserl’s First Philosophy?’ PPR 42 (1982) 610–20. 39 On whether this question is a genuine problem see Diane Perpich, The Ethics of Emmanuel Levinas (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008) 1–16. 40 Edith Wyschogrod, ‘Language and Alterity in the Thought of Levinas,’ The Cambridge Companion to Levinas, ed. Simon Critchley and Robert Bernasconi (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002) 188–205. 41 A military aphorism of unknown origin captures this notion perfectly: ‘If your enemy is within range, so are you.’ 42 B. T. Shabbat 31a; RA 200, no. 539. 43 Emmanuel Levinas, Otherwise than Being, or Beyond Essence, tr. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1998) 124; 127. 44 Emmanuel Lévinas, Totalité et infini: Essai sur l’extériorité (Paris: Librairie Générale Française, 2006) 211–20. 45 Emmanuel Levinas, Entre Nous: On Thinking-of-the-Other, tr. Michael B. Smith and Barbara Harshav (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998) 219–22. Samuel Moyn suggests that this concept of reciprocal asymmetry originates with Rosenzweig (Samuel Moyn, Origins of the Other: Emmanuel Levinas between Revelation and Ethics [Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005] 145–49). 46 For the sake of clarity, we may define moral realism as the philosophical position that holds that value statements are unconditionally true: in other words, that they are moral ‘facts.’ Thus ‘lying is wrong’ has the same truth value as ‘red is a color.’ Relational realism, a concept that originates in Plato’s Parmenides and may be found among various later Platonists, holds that ‘I and you’ represents a reality in which each party participates. Hence ‘I and you’ becomes a virtual person in its own right, with me and you constituting it as necessary but subordinate components. 47 See Gabriel Marcel, Homo Viator: Introduction to a Metaphysic of Hope, tr. Emma Craufurd (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1962), esp. 13–28; and The Philosophy of Existentialism, tr. Manya Harari (New York: Citadel Press, 1970) 91–201. For context, see Louis Pamplume, ‘Gabriel Marcel: Existence, Being, and Faith,’ Yale French Studies 12 (1953) 88–100; Roger Hazelton, ‘Marcel on Mystery,’ JR 38 (1958) 155–67; and H. J. Blackham, Six Existentialist Thinkers (New York: Harper, 1969) 66–85. Marcel’s thought, both for its phenomenological acuity and its influence on writers like Levinas, deserves more attention than it has received. 48 For contemporary commentary see Herbert Kraus, The Crisis of German Democracy, ed. W. S. Myers (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1932); Gerhard Anschutz, Die Verfassung der Deutschen vom 11. August, 1919: Ein Kommentar für Wissenschaft und Praxis, 14th edn. (Berlin: Georg Stilke, 1933); Otto Meissner and Georg Kaisenberg, Staats- und Verwaltungsrecht im Dritten Reich (Berlin: Verlag für Sozialpolitik, Wirtschaft, und Statistik, 1935); Karl Loewenstein, Hitler’s Germany: The Nazi Background to War (New York: Macmillan, 1939); Frederick M. Watkins, The Failure of Constitutional Emergency Powers under the German Republic (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1939); Arnold Brecht, Prelude to Silence: The End of the German Republic (New York: Oxford University Press, 1944); Willibalt Apelt, Geschichte der Weimarer Verfassung (Munich: Biederstein, 1946). 49 Seymour Martin Lipset, Political Man: The Social Bases of Politics (Garden City: Anchor, 1963) 256, 161, 308; Edward Alexander, Classical Liberalism and the Jewish Tradition (New Brunswick: Transaction, 2002). 50 Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958) 313–20; for the Jewish context of her thought, see Joanna Vecchiarelli Scott, ‘Hannah Arendt Twenty Years Later: A German Jewess in the Age of Totalitarianism,’ NGC

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52 53

54

55

56

57

58 59 60

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86 (2002) 19–42; more broadly, Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, Why Arendt Matters (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006). Ernst Cassirer, The Myth of the State (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1946) 277–98, and the appreciation by Leo Strauss (What is Political Philosophy? and Other Studies [Glencoe: Free Press, 1959] 292–96); see also David A. Wisner, ‘Ernst Cassirer, Historian of the Will,’ JHI 58 (1977) 145–61. Paul Tillich, The Protestant Era, tr. James Luther Adams (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1948) xx–xxi, 237–52; Peter Slater, ‘Dynamic Religion, Formative Culture, and the Demonic in History,’ HTR 92 (1999) 95–110. The latest contributions to the vast literature are Steven T. Katz, Gershon Greenberg, and Shlomo Biderman, eds., Wrestling with God: Jewish Theological Responses During and After the Holocaust (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006); Steven T. Katz, ed., The Impact of the Holocaust on Jewish Theology (New York: New York University Press, 2007); and David Weiss Halivni, Breaking the Tablets: Jewish Theology after the Shoah (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2007). Daniel Jeremy Silver, ‘Nachmanides’ Commentary on the Book of Job,’ JQR n.s. 60 (1969) 9–26; J. David Bleich, ‘Duran’s View of the Nature of Providence,’ JQR n.s. 69 (1979) 208–25; Charles M. Raffel, ‘Providence as Consequent upon the Intellect: Maimonides’ Theory of Providence,’ AJSR 12 (1987) 25–71; Robert Eisen, ‘Samuel Ibn Tibbon on the Book of Job,’ AJSR 24 (1999) 263–300. Shifts in biblical interpretation are reflected in a number of the essays in Tod Linafelt, ed., Strange Fire: Reading the Bible after the Holocaust (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 2000). See also Serge Liberman and Shimon Cowen, ‘Koheles (Ecclesiastes) and Existentialism,’ Journal of Judaism and Civilization 2 (1999) 104–12; and Benjamin Kyle Berger, ‘Qohelet and the Exigencies of the Absurd,’ BI 9 (2001) 141–79. Edward H. Madden and Peter H. Hare, ‘On the Difficulty of Evading the Problem of Evil,’ PPR 28 (1967) 58–69; Kenneth Surin, ‘Theodicy?’ HTR 76 (1983) 225–47; Paul Ricoeur, ‘Evil, A Challenge to Philosophy and Theology,’ JAAR 53 (1985) 635–48; more recently, Isabel Cabrera, ‘Is God Evil?’ in Rethinking Evil: Contemporary Perspectives, ed. María Pía Lara (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001) 17–26; and Susan Neiman, Evil in Modern Thought: An Alternative History of Philosophy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002) 250–67. Arthur A. Cohen, The Tremendum: A Theological Interpretation of the Holocaust (New York: Continuum, 1993) esp. 39–45; also in ‘Thinking the Tremendum: Some Theological Implications of the Death Camps,’ in An Arthur A. Cohen Reader, ed. David Stern and Paul Mendes-Flohr (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1998) 234–49. For the basis of the adaptation see Rudolf Otto, The Idea of the Holy, tr. John W. Harvey, 2nd edn. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1950) 12–24. Cohen, The Tremendum, 49. Cohen, The Tremendum, 34–35, 39, 56–58, 73–78, 95–100. The death-of-God position is carefully summarized by Bowman L. Clarke, ‘Theology and Philosophy,’ JAAR 38 (1970) 276–88, and by Colin Lyas in ‘On the Coherence of Christian Atheism,’ Philosophy 45 (1970) 1–19. Rubenstein’s own stance toward the movement is articulated in After Auschwitz: History, Theology, and Contemporary Judaism, 2nd edn. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992) 247–65. See also Gabriel Vahanian, The Death of God (New York: George Braziller, 1961); F. Thomas Trotter, ‘Variations on the “Death of God” Theme in Recent Theology,’ Journal of Bible and Religion 33 (1965) 42–48; Daniel C. Noel, ‘Still Reading His Will? Problems and Resources for the Death-of-God Theology,’ JR 46 (1966) 463–76; and Harvey Cox, ‘The Death of God and the Future of Theology,’ New Theology No. 4, ed. Martin E. Marty and Dean G. Peerman (New York: Macmillan, 1967) 243–53. For an adept assessment of contributing factors see Sydney E. Ahlstrom, ‘The Radical Turn in Theology and Ethics: Why it Occurred in the 1960’s,’ Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 387 (1970) 1–13. Hans Jonas, ‘The Concept of God after Auschwitz: A Jewish Voice,’ JR 67 (1987) 1–13.

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62 Richard L. Rubenstein, ‘The Meaning of Torah in Contemporary Jewish Theology: An Existentialist Philosophy of Judaism,’ Journal of Bible and Religion 32 (1964) 115–24. 63 Rubenstein, ‘Meaning of Torah,’ 118. 64 Richard L. Rubenstein, ‘Job and Auschwitz,’ New Theology No. 8, ed. Martin E. Marty and Dean G. Peerman (New York: Macmillan, 1971) 270–90 (repr. in Linafelt, ed., Strange Fire). 65 Rubenstein, ‘Job and Auschwitz,’ 282. 66 Rubenstein, ‘Job and Auschwitz,’ 277; for an extended discussion of the event as a moralturning point in history see George M. Kren and Leon Rappoport, The Holocaust and the Crisis of Human Behavior (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1980). Jacob Neusner argues on the other hand that the Holocaust does not mark a decisive turning-point in Jewish thought (‘The Implications of the Holocaust,’ JR 53 [1973] 293–308). 67 Steven T. Katz, ‘Richard Rubenstein, the God of History, and the Logic of Judaism,’ JAAR 46 (1987) 363. 68 Zachary Braiterman, ‘“Hitler’s Accomplice?”: The Tragic Theology of Richard Rubenstein,’ MJ 17 (1997) 75–89. 69 Emil L. Fackenheim, The Jewish Return to History: Reflections in the Age of Auschwitz and a New Jerusalem (New York: Schocken, 1980). 70 Emil L. Fackenheim, ‘The Holocaust and Philosophy,’ JP 82 (1985) 505–14. 71 Emil L. Fackenheim, To Mend the World: Foundations of Post-Holocaust Jewish Thought (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994) xxxvii. 72 Fackenheim, To Mend the World, xli–xlii. 73 Fackenheim, To Mend the World, 233–40. 74 ‘Their [the victims’] resisting thought pointed to and made possible a resisting life; our post-Holocaust thought ... would still lapse into inauthenticity ... if it failed to point to, and help make possible, a post-Holocaust life’ (To Mend the World, 249; emphasis Fackenheim’s). Martyrdom-as-resistance, with affinities between the Holocaust and earlier instances of sanctification of the Name, is the theme of Ralph Melnick, ‘Our Own Deeper Joy: Spiritual Resistance after the Holocaust,’ JR 75 (1995) 392–400. 75 The meaning ‘setting in order’ for Nqt suggests proper arrangement more than the ‘healing’ usually associated with tikkun in its modern uses; quite early it seems to have been used for emendations of scribal errors (David Weiss Halivni, ‘Reflections on Classical Jewish Hermeneutics,’ PAAJR 62 [1996] 120). The mystical use of the concept of mending, which can be traced to Lurianic Kabbalah (on which see JS 2, 69–70), has been popularized as an ethical principle by Jonathan Sacks, To Heal a Fractured World: The Ethics of Responsibility (New York: Schocken, 2005) 75–78. 76 Fackenheim, To Mend the World, 300. For commentary on the concept, see David Patterson, Emil L. Fackenheim: A Jewish Philosopher’s Response to the Holocaust (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2008) 155–85. 77 Fackenheim, To Mend the World, xliii. 78 Fackenheim’s insistence that a response is necessary even in the face of the incomprehensible flies in the face of Anglo-American positivism, symbolized best in Ludwig Wittgenstein’s imperative that one must pass over in silence that about which one cannot speak (Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, tr. C. K. Ogden [Mineola, NY: Dover, 1999] §7, p. 108). A trenchant critique of Fackenheim’s assumption that the Holocaust must be beyond rationality is offered by Arthur A. Cohen, ‘On Emil Fackenheim’s To Mend the World: A Review Essay,’ MJ 3 (1983) 225–36. On the use of Job as a traditional model for Jewish responses to evil, see Kenneth Seeskin, Jewish Philosophy in a Secular Age (Albany: SUNY Press, 1990) 169–88; Oliver Leaman, Evil and Suffering in Jewish Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Ptress, 1995) 19–32, 223–25; and Robert Eisen, The Book of Job in Medieval Jewish Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004).

Chapter 7

REALMS OF REDEMPTION

MEANING AND EXPERIENCE In 1932 Henri Bergson, the first Jew elected to the Académie Française and the 1928 recipient of the Nobel Prize for literature, published a work on religious experience entitled The Two Sources of Morality and Religion. Continuing with lines of thought begun around the turn of the century, Bergson, one of the founders of phenomenology and the center of a separate cadre of devoted followers (‘Bergsonism’ is more eclectic than phenomenology), argued that religion and morality cannot be separated and originate in a common experience. Moral-religious value is generated, according to Bergson, at the intersection of the ‘static’ system generically referred to as the mythical and the ‘dynamic’ adjustment to that fixed dimension over time.1 The basic structure should be somewhat familiar: much of Bergson’s own thought overlapped with the work of some of the authors we have already encountered, and some of his boldest innovations have become domesticated in the continental mainstream. In Judaism it is fair to say that there are two sources of meaning, one fixed and one fluid, and that the sustaining impetus for the continuity of the tradition is found at their conjunction. But as we have also seen, this conjunction could be negotiated from a number of angles, all of them with historical precedent even if some were mutually exclusive. The early modern division between rationalism and enthusiasm offers a uniquely useful explanatory distinction for uncovering the foundations of value in everyday life. As we have seen, the early mutual antagonism of Hasidism and Rabbinism was grounded in contrasting understandings of revelation. As would be expected, the division was not solely over what revelation was comprised of, but more significantly concerned how the divine intention for Israel was to be interpreted. The conflict between legalism and mysticism may be a thing of the past; if it is not, it is not our place to enter into it or to reconcile it. What is worth pointing out is the clarity of the paths in their original conceptions. The life of study, operating on the belief that restoration will come as surely, and under like conditions, as it did in the sixth century BCE, gave Talmudic activity an active role in the divine–human dynamic in worldly history. Immediate

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experience of divine energy, the active component in Hasidism, assigned a similar importance to spontaneous benevolence. In the discussion that follows we will ignore the conventional divisions of Reform, Orthodox, and Conservative Judaism in favor of rubrics deeply rooted in the tradition and for our purposes bearing greater explanatory utility. We have seen in chapter 5 above that Torah can be defined as that form of revelation to which the pious Jew adheres, no matter what approach he or she takes to the text. At this point we wish to suggest that there is an alternate mode of divine–human relation, one that is not mediated by positive scriptural revelation. Oral Torah, being the fluid counterpart to the fixed revelation of the Tanakh, is a norm constructed as much as it is received and transmitted. As such it may, in its contemporary form, represent the active element in the work of preserving the meaning of Jewish identity. Returning for a moment to Bergson, we might suggest that the fluid element in the tension he describes is the ongoing work of interpretation, a process intrinsically dynamic, an organism that adapts in order to survive. As was also pointed out above, in the Judaic mainstream this energy is directed at the static textual corpus of revelation. Less readily recognized is the degree to which this interpretive dynamic can be applied to the other medium of divine revelation: the world itself. Quite simply, the functional continuation of Oral Torah, absent the written canon of traditional veneration, is a Judaic hermeneutic of experience. The ‘Judaic’ part of this category can be clarified straightforwardly and without recourse to the ethnic classifications that led antisemites of the last century to disparage Felix Klein’s and Hermann Minkowski’s work as ‘Jewish mathematics’ and ‘Jewish physics.’2 In keeping with our guidelines, we hold that the qualifier ‘Jewish’ should be bound to belief in the uniqueness and incorporeality of a sovereign deity. Experience, on the other hand, takes two forms, one cultural, one natural. Accordingly our discussion will be divided into two sections, the first on interpretations of history, the second on cosmology. THE COURSE OF HISTORY Redemption has peculiar connotations in modern thought, in German particularly. To be sure, a veritable library on the theme has been composed by German theologians from Luther onwards, so that it became the unchallenged core of Christian belief. But since the age of Classicism it had acquired a more obviously worldly meaning as well. The closing line of Goethe’s Faust is a declaration of redemption, and certain political theorists of the nineteenth century saw a Christian state as a redemptive agent in world history. As we have pointed out, the concept of redemption in Jewish thought is conditioned by the long Diaspora: it takes the form of belief in a restoration to the divinely intended state of affairs for the covenantal people. Secularized modernity altered such expectations and prompted a variety of new concep-

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tualizations of the normative state. One commonality underlies all the formulations: there was no abandoning of faith in a divine sovereignty that would in the end be vindicated in a redemptive moment. The Jewish deity was understood as one who redeems, and in redeeming proves triumphant over the powers of the world.3 The ancient conjunction of cosmic deity with covenantal lord remained the structural anchor for a bewildering array of interpretations of existence, whether across the broad historical scale or within the microcosm of individual self-awareness. Restoration can be construed either abstractly or concretely, and there are significant variations within each alternative. Within Judaism, redemption presents the most demanding theological challenges. History and abstraction collide on this topic, and geography and imagination contend for the position of authentic homeland. Until the end of the eighteenth century, physical restoration to Zion seemed a possibility contingent only on divine intervention in the course of history: and the rise of the Wissenschaft des Judentums and Reform movements had cast a shadow of skepticism across belief in the miraculous.4 There were of course those who continued to see God’s hand at work in all things, even in the contriving of scholarly distractions to filter out true believers. For these literalists, belief in the historical factuality of the canonical narrative was incomplete without a corresponding expectation of redemption in the geopolitical theater. The historical origins of the people of Israel had been subjected to intensive archaeological and historical scrutiny, indeed in many cases by practitioners of the new science of Judaism. The more intently Israelite history became a subject of academic investigation, the more early Jewish culture began to resemble other civilizations of Mediterranean antiquity, each with its own folklore, organization, and religion. It was virtually an article of faith among many of these specialists that the divine acts recounted in the narratives were myth rather than history.5 As a result, any thought that narratives of restoration to Zion might be echoed in modernity scarcely entered the realm of possibility.6 Not that Zionism did not exist, first as an idea and later as a movement. As weekday and Sabbath services attest, and festival ceremonies reinforce, no theme was more intimately woven into Jewish liturgy than the expectation of return.7 Hope for restoration never left the Jewish religious imagination, but pious affirmations and realistic expectations were not the same thing.8 With the dawn of modernity, in Ismar Elbogen’s words, ‘The Jews awoke from a dream of centuries; the longing for the messianic redemption retreated in the face of the desire to live in comfort in this world.’9 Yet certainly by the end of the nineteenth century such comfort had proved elusive and tenuous, prompting new convictions that the alienation of Jews had to be resolved geopolitically rather than culturally. As a social movement, Zionism found its most eloquent expression in the work of Theodor Herzl (1860–1904), whose 1896 pamphlet The Jewish State became a highly influential – and controversial – manifesto.10 In its appeal to the deepest sense of Jewish identity, Zionism was much more than a social movement, however. Thinkers from Herzl to Buber

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addressed the sense of rootlessness that they found in Jews’ self-understanding, invoking the modern connection of ethnicity with autonomous statehood.11 Just as the geographical Zion was never not a place, so was it always also a symbol, the ‘junction between heaven and earth’ as one biblical scholar terms it.12 But a fixed place is either properly inhabited or it is not; the same cannot be said of symbols. A symbol may remain a constant feature of a culture (for Judaism, the menorah in antiquity and the Star of David in modernity), but what it represents changes over time.13 The restoration of the people to the geographic space established and organized by secular political institutions has been as much of a challenge as a relief.14 That a return to Zion had occurred was beyond doubt, and in that respect the Jewish people were no longer in full Diaspora. On the other hand, the state came into being by means of agents that only with the greatest difficulty could be imagined as instruments of the deity of the biblical people Israel. And, added to the unlikely characters who reprised the role of Cyrus the Persian, the impossibility of rebuilding the Third Temple raised doubts that the long-awaited restoration had this time commenced. Contrary to the commonplace disjunction by which one is either in a state of exile or is not, the 1948 formation of the state of Israel represented a return to Zion in one dimension only: that of space. Restoration in time could only mean a return of the Temple and its priesthood and an exchange of synagogue ritual for sacrificial rite. The creation of political Israel without its complement in the religious realm left many in a state of suspended restoration, a feeling perhaps similar to the restlessness displayed during the interim between Egypt and Canaan. We recognize that suggesting that physical restoration to Zion is not the only understanding of redemption in Judaism has a tinge of the heretical to it. The holy city and the hope for return have been inextricably woven into the fabric of Jewish memory, and proposals to understand Jerusalem as a metaphor have kept their authors, such as Mendelssohn, on the margins of the Jewish intellectual canon. Were there no geographical reference point, there would be no Diaspora. But a return to the ancient homeland is not the only possible remedy for the restlessness and alienation experienced by the Jew in secular modernity. Historical origins notwithstanding, Diaspora can serve as a metaphor for the predicament of spiritual discomfort in a material culture. And when thus construed, redemption may be any durable resolution of that discomfort. EXPERIENCE AND THE ABSOLUTE ‘The world of Thou has no connection in space and time.’15 With these words, easily dismissed as just another peripheral aphorism, Buber indicates that genuine relation transcends material conditions. As we have seen in the previous chapter, Buber makes it clear that authentic intersubjectivity is

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participation in the Eternal You; we have also noted that he leaves unanswered the critical question of whether this transcendent being is an agent separate from the realm of experience or the sum of all I–You relations. This aporia was a common problem among religious philosophers in the twentieth century, for no terms had been set for accommodating theism to the phenomenology of experience. Part of the problem is systematic, depending on how elastic one considers the concept of God. Another part is conceptual, for if one is engaging the idea of the Absolute (or its terminological equivalents), what is description actually doing? Language can reduce abstractions to intelligible form, but it can also point to realities beyond rational grasp, at least for those not analytically oriented.16 One philosopher, speaking for many in the last century, holds that the ineffable – that which cannot be captured by words – is a component of all communication, spoken and written.17 Mystical traditions have known this, in some form, all along: it is one of their operative presuppositions.18 Philosophers who take seriously the affective element in experience, whether it be expressed as aesthetic sensation or as the religious Gefühl of the Romantics, have recognized that subjects give meaning to perceptions; the objects perceived do not transmit their meaning. This core concept is readily illustrated by the phenomenological power of sacred scripture and the intentionality present in authentic relationship. It loses some of its transparency when applied to a material realm ostensibly already under the control of scientific method. Cultural perspective is an acknowledged factor in hermeneutics and ethics, actually in the understanding of culture generally; but the natural world, it would seem, demands to be understood in its own terms. Jewish religious thinkers in the twentieth century addressed an urgent and exacting question: whether the holy could be experienced in those modes of being in which it is not usually thought to be present. Technological culture and the categories of material experience appear almost by definition to resist sacrality. In the twentieth century, however, several Jewish thinkers saw hazards in the social-scientific reductions of culture and the claims of the natural sciences to apply totalizing laws with unique explanatory power. The scientific ‘city,’ like the alternate civilizations of Near Eastern antiquity before Israel became a people, could easily be seen as yet another of those host cultures toward which the Jewish collective memory had been conditioned to be wary. Unthinking hostility to science was not a factor in this apprehensiveness; scriptural revelation did not make claims so exclusive as to demand a disjunctive choice between Torah and scientific inquiry, and the legacy of Maimonides was sufficiently strong to prevent the warfare of science and religion that Christianity saw in the early twentieth century. Rather, it was the categorical dismissal of the supernatural that elicited responses from within this tradition. Addressing the largest of large topics, these thinkers argued that the material world, however knowable and workable it was,

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drew its meaning from a reality beyond itself. That is to say, the material realm was relativized by a divine Absolute. The relation of space to time, those categories of finite existence, may be a uniquely religious problem, and a theistic one at that.19 The critical but seemingly unanswerable theological question is whether, in the Absolute that is the other side of creation, space and time are separate dimensions or a single plane of being. As was pointed out in chapter 1, indefinite extension in both space and time is signified by the Hebrew ‘olam, a term for a more inclusive totality than other languages seem to have. Notwithstanding an originality that helped them reshape modern Jewish theology, Rosenzweig, Buber, and Heschel were indebted to a line of philosophical and theological predecessors who had by the late nineteenth century begun to see space and time, in their relatedness and contingency, as the finite realm from which redemption could be realized only in the form of an immediate spiritual experience of the absolute. Ironic as it may at first appear, the lessening of material oppression in nineteenth-century Europe helped stimulate new conceptions of the Diaspora experience, which in turn allowed for some of the constructive contributions of twentieth-century Jewish thinkers. Space and time, finite and contingent and thus subject to divine sovereignty according to this constructive trend within modern Jewish philosophical thought, are understood to stand in dialectical relation to a realm beyond the vagaries of material existence. Preserving the polarity of exile and redemption that had structured Jewish thought during the Diaspora, this succession of thinkers, in part inspired by Kant and partly by a few German Idealists, began to identify the redemptive ‘olam with an absolute spiritual realm beyond the geopolitical sphere. In thus asserting an ultimate reality ontologically distinct from the material world, these theologians articulate with unusual (but generally unappreciated) clarity a form of transcendence beyond space and time. The waves of emancipation and the rise of scientific modernity seemed to have helped foster a sense that an anticipated messianic restoration to geographic Zion was a medieval symbol for a continuous and/or immediate transformation of experience. While this line of thought originates in the early Haskalah, the transformation of material experience is later evoked most powerfully in Buber and the later Heschel, both of whom describe an intersection of the absolute with the finite in the present: the former in the I–Thou relation, the latter in the experience of timelessness in the Sabbath. With this conception of the experience of divine sovereignty these theologians contribute a valuable Jewish perspective to Continental existential thought. Although the triadic structure of the Star of Redemption invites comparisons with the dialectical organization of Buber’s work, the similarities are superficial alongside the profound differences in the phenomenology of the Holy. Rosenzweig’s divine Other is never intermingled with human relationships; in his doctrine of God he is unquestionably a realist: a significant qualification of his current identification as an Existentialist.20 To take one example, Rosenzweig applies the concept of Revelation in ways impossible

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for Buber. In revelation God discloses the divine intention in creation, illuminating an order unobservable in material nature itself. And in Redemption the telos of eternal life is presented as the transcendence of the finitude that humans confront in their awareness of mortality.21 In Rosenzweig’s words, Under the category of Redemption, there has always been subsumed a so to speak natural base; under the category of Revelation, it was that which is the concern of the craft, the laborious side, that which is obtained by toil, by the sweat of his brow, the specifically ‘aesthetic’; and under the category of Redemption, it was the proper and visible character, that which must end by ‘coming out’ and that for which alone the rest had to precede.22 Beyond and apart from both Buber and Rosenzweig, Heschel interweaves the eternal and time in a way that draws from both the experienced infinite of Buber’s Eternal Thou and the redemptive dynamic of Rosenzweig’s Star. In The Sabbath the finitude of temporal existence is reflected in its being broken into an indefinite sequence of weekly cycles by the recurring intersection of a sanctified dimension which transcends chronological limit. Drawing both on the biblical creation narrative and the experience of alienation in secular modernity, Heschel’s critique of technological civilization, like Buber’s, is that in its determination to attain mastery of the material realm it has become oblivious to the transcendent, and hence its activity is mere restlessness, having lost any authentic meaning. Heschel’s spatial realm is one that can be conquered by human agency; the temporal realm cannot be harnessed for human ends.23 Time, in Heschel’s thinking, is the medium for contact with the Holy: ‘Judaism is a religion of time aiming at the sanctification of time.’24 In its very abstractness, time lends itself to a variety of conceptions, and it may be true that every era has its own understanding of time.25 For Heschel, God’s work in creation was in ordering time, and in revelation it was the designation of time for encounters with the Holy. God chose the day as well as the people.26 And in observing chosen times, the chosen people understand that what they possess is not the product of their own unaided effort but of the will of God.27 Personifying the Sabbath as the ‘queen’ of Safed spirituality and the bride of the Song of Songs, Heschel makes real both union with God and the fullness of divine love. THE REDEMPTIVE TRIAD Exposure to the brutalities of war, and his own battle with debilitating infirmity, gave Franz Rosenzweig, whom we encountered in the previous chapter, a powerful understanding of the human condition and an intimate sense of the nearness of death. He also had a subtler, but no less profound, introduction to the possibilities of transcendence; and his early religious

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experience cannot be ignored as a factor in his later thought. The Jewish milieu of his youth was assimilationist to the core, some of his own ancestors having been instrumental in the creation of the Reform movement. Two of his cousins ‘completed’ their Jewish identity by converting to Protestantism, and Rozenzweig came close to doing the same. In October 1913, Rosenzweig was reading the New Testament in preparation for baptism while attending synagogue for the High Holy Days, at the end of the month recognizing that he had to be what he was: a Jew. Yom Kippur, the moment of Rosenzweig’s realization, is the point at which the previous year’s deeds are concentrated into a day and the individual stands in the immediate presence of God. More than a ritual purgation of misdeeds, the Day of Atonement is a symbolic triangulation of the individual, the deity, and the neighbor: an authentic intersection of the divine and human planes of experience.28 Recognition events such as these, which in different jargon may be called the illumination of intuitive understanding, have been defining moments of Jewish self-awareness ever since Abraham first heard the divine call. In paradoxical formulations typical of early twentieth-century Continental speculation, Rosenzweig locates the search for understanding at the boundary separating the self from the other, and dividing affirmation from negation. The search, as Rosenzweig depicts it, is intensely personal: one becomes aware of subjectivity in the encounter with finitude: ‘All cognition of the All originates in death, in the fear of death.’29 The stark inevitability of death, once it is grasped by the frail and finite subject, threatens to drive the individual to fatalistic passivity; Rosenzweig acknowledges the power of the fear of death, but insists that it serve as a stimulus to a life that affirms, even in the face of this fear. The life-affirming will, when exercised, negates the fear of death though it can never fully extinguish it. For Rosenzweig, the object of awareness is the All, yet the conditions limiting human understanding prevent a grasp of the one thing worth knowing. Thus, like the concept of infinity, the All is simultaneously known and not known. This is the point at which the reader becomes either exasperated or entranced, depending on the degree of openness to the intuitive. The cryptic surrounds Rosenzweig’s program like the proverbial hedge around Torah, and only those already within his pattern of thinking will be able to make sense of his words. Tolerance for tendentious discourse may run in cycles, and the less familiar one is with the language of Idealism the more foreign Rosenzweig’s key concepts may seem. His work is unusual but not impossible to understand. Rosenzweig adopts the theological method of via negativa, normative during the golden age of medieval Christian mysticism, for his conception of God. In the ‘negative path’ God is not known according to specific attributes (attributing qualities to God is the method of the ‘positive’ way, or via positiva), but as the being beyond what can be known by persons. The divine, necessarily existing and unknowable, occupies a unique plane of being, which Rosenzweig labels the Naught. The Naught is not nothing: it is the unknowable absolute being in which all particulars participate.

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Rosenzweig’s Star is organized around three concepts: creation, revelation, and redemption. Yet, as might be expected, these terms take on new meaning in this most unusual of religious systems. Creation, the easiest of these, is presented in terms similar to those used by nineteenth-century Christian theologians: it is consciousness of being created. Not just of having been created, in some primordial origination, but of continued createdness.30 Subordinating the particular and material to the universal and intangible in a relative-to-absolute relation is a bold move, reminiscent of Scholastic attempts to adapt Platonic realism to Christian ends. Such a step is not an accommodation to neo-Platonist tendencies, though the affinity with that branch of metaphysics is indisputable. Whether intended or not, the postKantian course of philosophical Idealism opened the door for the form of realism inaugurated by Plato. The Star is a demanding book, a challenge to readers’ expectations in both style and scope of the subject. Evocative in some ways of medieval treatises on topics beyond the scope of modern academic concerns, Rosenzweig’s book describes the world in its most comprehensive sense. Triadic in its organization, the work proceeds from creation through revelation to redemption, in each part revealing an unusually synthetic erudition as well as insights of startling acuity, at least for those able to follow the prose. This is not a gratuitous comment: Rosenzweig employs a terminology that is partly of his own coinage, partly an adaptation of his contemporaries’ neologisms, and partly ordinary language used in extraordinary locutions.31 Other modern philosophers, such as Heidegger and Whitehead, were as elusive in their writing, but their opacity could be penetrated by familiarity with their other works. Rosenzweig however is a philosopher of a single book, and hence rhetorically his writing is demanding indeed. A reader can catch flashes of familiarity when wrestling with the Star, because the conceptual spine and thus a fair measure of the terminology are biblical in character. The defining categories of creation, revelation, and redemption, as well as the articulations under those rubrics, are fully contextualized against a scriptural backdrop, and the Star is in its own way a constructive exegesis of Torah. Each of the three central chapters is a midrash, not on specific verses but on themes: God’s creative work; divine love; and the command to love the neighbor. Rosenzweig’s readers can only draw out his insights if they are as firmly grounded as he in the scriptural corpus, a canon of thought and not merely a body of texts. It is surely impossible to capture in a single formula Rosenzweig’s relation to scripture; he would probably, and wisely, have resisted such an attempt himself. But it goes without saying that, however closely his thought was bound to the sacred canon, in approach it was also distinctly modern and could not have taken shape in an earlier decade. The originality of Rosenzweig’s work may be seen from two aspects: the role of intuition in discerning revelation, and the prophetic calling that is driven by that intuitive discernment.

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COVENANTAL TEMPORALITY Probably in no tradition is the concept of time more pluriform, or more elusive, than in Judaism. From a scriptural narrative that seems (and perhaps only seems) to begin at the beginning, through a succession of new beginnings extending to the formation of Second Temple culture, the temporal perspective at times comes to resemble a hall of mirrors more than a fixed linear sequence. Time-bound in material life, the people Israel was bound together and to their deity through a network of narrative reference points intended to crystallize trust in divine sovereignty and benevolence. Equally evident is the fact that time has been one of the more difficult problems of modern metaphysics and science, the immaterial rock upon which many materialist philosophers have run aground.32 Augustine’s paradox concerning time has continued to hold sway: ‘If no one asks me, I know; but if I wished to explain it to someone asking, I do not know.’33 Such a statement may be perfectly clear to a mystic but it is exasperating in the extreme for those who want knowledge and explainability to be of one piece.34 As prominent as time has been as a point of contention in contemporary philosophy, its place in modern religious thought has remained relatively ignored. Some of this neglect is easily accounted for by the modernist adaptation to a model of linear progress. But acknowledging a continuum creates rather than solves problems of temporal perspective for a religious tradition in which a cyclical view conditions a people’s self-understanding. To an extraordinary degree, Jewish thought in modernity revolves around the relation of scientific time to the divinely ordained arrangement of human experience. Faced with this dilemma, Jewish thinkers in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries strove to reconcile the arrow of time with the timelessness of divine agency while acknowledging that each possesses its own absoluteness. The question is not adequately reducible to a choice or compromise between alternate ontologies of time, but may best be conceptualized as the need to preserve the ‘covenantal timeframe,’ so to speak, within the fixity of linear time. In phenomenological terms, Jewish perspectives on temporality are concerned with the possibility of experiencing time in two aspects at once. For reasons which should be evident from what has been said earlier, terms like ‘narrative’ and ‘historical’ time, while useful in other lines of discourse, become exasperatingly ambiguous when applied to the question at hand. Alternate theological constructions, such as Tillich’s distinction between chronos and kairos, help in differentiating objective and subjective aspects of temporality but are too firmly grounded in the Christian worldview to be applicable here. Moreover, if some of the observations of the preceding chapters are credible, then ‘subjective’ and ‘objective’ are terms too elastic to have much explanatory utility at this point. The term ‘historical consciousness,’ as elucidated by Ricoeur, offers a valuable connection with the concepts of intentionality and Bewußtsein that fueled the beginnings of the

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phenomenological movement.35 For our purposes, however, ‘historical’ suggests only one dimension of temporality, the relation of present to past, and thus neglects the eschatological reference point of covenantal identity. While no single term captures the complexity of the Jewish awareness of time, ‘covenantal temporality’ may be a useful label, until a better can be coined, for various Judaic conceptions of history. The concept, whatever it has been named in the past, is not a modern one. Philo, whom we first encountered in chapter 2, locates time within the realm of material change: ‘It would therefore be correct to say that the world was not made in time, but that time was formed by means of the world, for it was heaven’s movement that was the index of the nature of time.’36 And thinkers from Philo to Maimonides (and beyond) have addressed the perennial question of whether the world exists eternally or was created within time.37 To this day the question of eternity of the cosmos or a specific starting-point for the universe is for many a test of the authority of revelation against the dominant assumptions of science. Fortunately that is not a issue that needs to be raised here, though the one that does call for our attention is no less demanding. What needs to be addressed is whether a religious worldview such as the one we have been examining can control the perception, and thus in a phenomenal sense the passage, of time. Is time itself experienced differently in Judaism? The idea of ‘Judaic time’ may strike one as bizarre since the ordering and progression of the material realm seem as objective and immutable as one could imagine. Yet as we have seen, the cosmology of this tradition holds change and eternity in tension: and abandoning this structure is tantamount to rejecting divine sovereignty. Moreover, the linear sequence of past–present–future does not operate in Hebrew. Instead, actions are represented according to whether they have been completed (the perfect) or remain ongoing (the imperfect); and whether the action captured by an imperfect has already taken place or is yet to do so is determined by syntax and context – and sometimes not even then.38 What God has done, God will continue to do; and what the people Israel has begun will likewise continue into an indefinite future. Covenantal temporality, our term for human existence in the Hebrew ‘imperfect tense,’ is the mode of being in which the irreversible sequence of events is subordinated to the sovereignty of a divine being beyond the limits of human experience. Life within the covenant is the preservation of a single community through the generations as well as across geographical separation, and in that way serves as an intentional negation of ‘secular’ or linear time. A distinctive ordering of time is especially evident in the calendrical system, which has run parallel to a secular chronology that provided the basis for fixed Christian feast days such as 25 December though not the movable lunar celebrations such as Ash Wednesday and Easter. Feast- and fast-days in the Jewish calendar are entirely fixed – but since the calendar is a lunar one, they ‘move’ backward and forward along the Gregorian grid. By itself that phenomenon has no more unusual significance than the observance in secular

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societies of the first Tuesday or the fourth Thursday in November. And of course there is nothing humanly changeable about the lunar cycle; its calendar is arguably less a human construction than the Gregorian one. But as a reflection of a distinct conception of time, the organization of the Jewish year serves to affirm a unique relation to secular time. Thus in the category of time, Jewish life remains distinct, and ordered by the same system that governed existence before the Exile. COSMOLOGY Divine sovereignty is both particular and universal: this paradox is one of the illuminating enigmas of Jewish thought. The Judaic deity governs the history of the people Israel as well as the larger order in which that history takes place. Given that binary structure and the dissonance between a providential destiny and a natural and cultural realm governed by frequently distinct values and forces, constructive Jewish thought is driven by a concern to explain and defend the ideal world of the covenant in relation to a reality hostile to such aspirations. At the risk of simplification, we might say that one Jewish experience of reconciliation is found in the sense that a productive tension holds together the cosmic and covenantal aspects of the godhead. An orderly and intelligible universe was more than an ideal imperfectly realized: it was an assumption that dominated scientific inquiry during the early modern period. The Baconian revolution, intended to free investigation from the dominance of both the ecclesiastical and Aristotelian traditions, succeeded in introducing a progressive understanding of knowledge, in the process rendering any final certainty all the more elusive. Investigations into optics and sense perception from the late seventeenth century onward reflect a shift in philosophical focus from ontology to epistemology, while the natural sciences entered a phase of formulating laws according to which matter in all its permutations could be quantified and understood. The details of the story are generally familiar and need not be rehearsed here. The Euclidean-Newtonian understanding of the world came under scrutiny in the late nineteenth century with the advent of non-Euclidean geometry and in the early twentieth with the emergence of quantum mechanics. Again, the broad development need not concern us, but certain specifics very much do. Briefly stated, equally coherent systems for understanding space and matter emerged alongside the classical paradigm, resulting in a dilemma aptly encapsulated by Hans Reichenbach’s disjunction, in which ‘the problem of mathematical space is recognized as different from the problem of physical space.’39 It is no exaggeration that Kant’s work left as durable an impact on the philosophy of science and mathematics as it did on metaphysics and ethics.40 The directionality of time was for Jewish thought one of the more formidable challenges posed by modernity, and intellectually the most demanding. Whether the progress of civilization was a fact or a (possibly dubious) idea

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was a cultural question demanding clarified definitions. But the movement of time itself was a matter for physicists, about which there seemed to be little dispute. As long as the classical approaches to spatio-temporal dimensions prevailed, the material world was safely ensconced within a measurable matrix.41 Confidence in the Euclidean-Newtonian tradition began to waver in 1879 and came apart in the early decades of the following century. Hermann Minkowski in 1908 prophetically declared that ‘Henceforth space by itself, and time by itself, are doomed to fade away into mere shadows, and only a kind of union of the two will preserve an independent unity.’42 Not all philosophers made constructive use of the advances in the sciences; even among metaphysicians the formulas of theoretical physics were entertained skeptically.43 One of the philosophers genuinely attuned to the genesis of quantum mechanics was Samuel Alexander (1859–1938), whose work anticipates the Process philosophy of Whitehead in significant ways.44 Alexander, a Spinozan at least so far as locating God in the material world is concerned, was one of the first metaphysicians to consider the ramifications of the new physics for ontology. In his 1916–18 Gifford Lectures at Glasgow, published as Space, Time, and Deity, Alexander addresses the question of reality and the existence of God from the perspective of (to coin a term) a ‘metaphysicist,’ one who is equal parts metaphysician and physicist. Without a reasonable knowledge of quantum and relativity principles, one is unlikely to understand Alexander very well, and those equating British philosophy with positivism will likewise be surprised or bewildered. It may be that this pair of demands accounts for Alexander’s present obscurity. One of the first metaphysicians to name space–time as the single source of the categories of experience, Alexander states that ‘Time makes Space distinct and Space makes Time distinct.’45 By this he means that there is no ‘this’ without a ‘now’; all objects of sense exist in space and time inextricably intertwined. This intertwined source of substances, space–time is not experienced (though space and time, separately, are), but intuited.46 This realm of intuited space–time is the Absolute to which all perceptions and understanding are relativized. Only in the final (and shortest) of the four books of Space, Time, and Deity does Alexander address ‘Deity,’ and given the difficulty of his text it may be that very few have made it through the nearly 700 pages to reach that part. And cosmologists and epistemologists might well consider his project complete with his discussion in Book III of empirical existence, just as philosophers have tended to dismiss the final part (Book V, ‘On God’) of Spinoza’s Ethics. For our purposes, however, Alexander’s opening question in this section is of vital interest: ‘What room is there for, and what place has been assigned to, God?’47 Taking a step back from the point at which Alexander asks the question, we might begin with an even more critical one: what does Alexander mean by ‘God’? Since the divine presence had been transformed into a metaphysical principle or cosmological ‘ground,’ the question whether a thinker’s conception of God is deistic or theistic is fundamental to the issue

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of whether an author’s work speaks to a society’s specifically religious interests.48 Alexander’s stance acknowledges religious intentionality in a fashion unusual for a thinker often associated with the British analytic school. Attributing a ‘religious emotion’ to the complete psychological constitution, Alexander posits God as the correlate of ‘that emotion or sentiment, as food is correlative to appetite’ with the critical proviso that hunger cannot create food, while religious desire might be satisfied by a mere product of the imagination.49 Whether God is a product of the imagination or the source of all things is a problem as old as the philosophy of religion, and so intractable as to have been left ignored by all but the boldest or most creative of thinkers. More creatively than boldly, Alexander asserts that the religious sentiment is the only thing that can be known; whatever might be known about God can only be known indirectly.50 True to his intuitionist bearing, Alexander holds that although persons cannot know God, they can apprehend ‘deity’: the abstract noun, of course, not a specific divine personage. Deity is the term Alexander uses for the level of being beyond space–time, the infinite counterpart to our finite experiences within space and time. Alexander’s cosmology operates along a chain of being from inanimate matter, to life, to mind, and ultimately to deity; hence deity is the next stage in the progression, and the object to which mind is directed. While the term ‘spirit’ is often used for this ultimate being, Alexander feels that spiritual is a quality of human experience rather than a property of deity. ‘Deity is therefore, according to the pattern of the growth of things in time, not a mere enlargement of mind or spirit, but something which mere spirit subserves, and to which accordingly the conception of spirit as such is totally inadequate.’51 In other words, religious sentiment may be described in terms of spiritual experience, but such descriptions are not applicable to deity itself. The key to Alexander’s concept of deity is captured in a memorable formula: Deity is to God as mind is to body. This needs to be contextualized against the broader canvas of his cosmology. In the progression of forms of being, the universe moves toward continually new levels of perfection, the apex of which is deity.52 Mind, for Alexander, evolves from body and inclines toward God, or the absolute perfection of the universe; in Process thought, as opposed to pantheism, God is a goal or telos, not a presence already within the empirical universe. In Alexander’s system, the body of God is the infinite totality of space–time, deity its final perfection.53 More profound and provocative is Alexander’s claim that ‘time is the mind of space,’ for here we find ourselves deep within the Alexandrian cosmology.54 Just as deity is the intuited perfection toward which the material world is inclined, so is the progression of matter one that takes place within time, time then serving as the ordering agent of space, and thus functionally as the ‘mind’ to the ‘body’ of space. Time, for Alexander, as generally in Process thought, takes precedence over space and matter; but Alexander goes so far as to associate it with deity. In his lectures on Spinoza, published after the Gifford Lectures,

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Alexander states that ‘Time has become an attribute to the ultimate reality … The grades of modal perfection are no longer a “static” series of forms, but a hierarchy produced in the order of time.’55 The cosmological factor of Time alters both the conception of God and the nature of religious emotion For Alexander, as opposed to Spinoza’s identification of God with nature, the religious sentiment is integral to human experience and evidence of the progressive order of being. ‘As love … is in its essence a specified reaction to an individual of the opposite sex, so religion is the reaction which we make to God as the whole universe with its nisus towards the new quality of deity.’56 Traces of concepts such as the reality of the intangible, and an eventual perfection that can only be intuited, will be evident to those familiar with the broader Jewish tradition, and in his critique of Spinoza’s pantheism Alexander may be closer to the center of that tradition than his contemporaries – or he himself – recognized. Alexander’s speculative system invites our own speculating: is the nonempirical character of deity a cosmological translation of the unknowable sovereign of Judaism? Does the presence of God in Alexander’s space–time correspond to the mystical immanence articulated in the Kabbalistic tradition? Is Alexander’s deity the transcendent divinity of his religious tradition, or a religious label for an unmistakably scientific concept? We can say with some confidence that Alexander would surely argue that his God (or deity) is consistent with the monotheistic tradition; his defense of the religious sentiment and his insistence that its object is real are evidence of that. As to the first two questions, we are left with suggestive but inconclusive similarities.

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Notes 1 2 3 4

5

6 7

8

9 10

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12 13

Henri Bergson, The Two Sources of Morality and Religion, tr. R. Ashley Audra and Cloudesley Brereton (New York: Henry Holt & Co., 1935; rpt. Garden City: Doubleday Anchor, n.d.). David E. Rowe, ‘“Jewish Mathematics” at Göttingen in the Era of Felix Klein,’ Isis 77 (1986) 422–49; Alan D. Beyerchen, Scientists Under Hitler: Politics and the Physics Community in the Third Reich (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977). Gershom Scholem, The Messianic Idea in Judaism and Other Essays on Jewish Spirituality (New York: Schocken, 1971). For a classic early statement, see Samuel S. Cohon, ‘The Mission of Reform Judaism,’ JR 2 (1922) 27–43; for narrative surveys, David Philipson, ‘The Beginnings of the Reform Movement in Judaism,’ JQR 15 (1903) 475–521; Michael A. Meyer, Response to Modernity: A History of the Reform Movement in Judaism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988; rpt. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1995). A fully modern and self-consciously ‘liberal’ statement against Zionism is Hermann Cohen’s response to Buber (in Reason and Hope: Selections from the Jewish Writings of Hermann Cohen, tr. Eva Jospe [Cincinnati: Hebrew Union College Press, 1993] 164–70). Alan R. Taylor, ‘Zionism and Jewish History,’ Journal of Palestine Studies 1 (1972) 35–51 offers a provocative reconstruction of the pre-history of Zionism and antiZionism. See The Complete ArtScroll Siddur, ed. Nosson Scherman and Meir Zlotowitz (Brooklyn: Mesorah Publications, 1990) 90–97, 124–37; Ismar Elbogen, Jewish Liturgy: A Comprehensive History, tr. Raymond P. Scheindlin (Philadelphia: JPS, 1993) 199–218. For some of the range of stances in the nineteenth century, see Chaim I. Waxman, ‘Messianism, Zionism, and the State of Israel,’ MJ 7 (1987) 175–92; Aviezer Ravitzky, Messianism, Zionism, and Jewish Religious Radicalism, tr. Michael Swirsky and Jonathan Chipman (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996). On religious opposition to Zionism see, e.g., Allan L. Nadler, ‘The War on Modernity of R. Hayyim Elazar Shapira of Munkacz,’ MJ 14 (1994) 233–64. Elbogen, Jewish Liturgy, 297. Alex Bein, Theodore Herzl: A Biography (Philadelphia: JPS, 1942); Amos Elon, Herzl (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1975); a revisionist view is offered by Jacques Kornberg, ‘Theodore Herzl: A Reevaluation,’ Journal of Modern History 52 (1980) 226–52: and Jacques Kornberg, Theodor Herzl: From Assimilation to Zionism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994). For the controversy in the wake of Herzl’s book see Walter Laqueur, ‘Zionism and Its Liberal Critics, 1896–1948,’ Journal of Contemporary History 6 (1971) 161–82, and A History of Zionism (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1972) 384–437. Paul R. Mendes-Flohr, ‘Between Existentialism and Zionism,’ JAAR 47 (1979) 429–40; Eliezer Don-Yehiya, ‘The Negation of Galut in Religions Zionism,’ MJ 12 (1992) 129–55; Arnold M. Eisen, ‘Reflections on the State of Zionist Thought,’ MJ 18 (1998) 253–66. Joseph Roth, who embodies the notion of ‘Judeity as Heimatslosigkeit’, is iconic of this mentality; see Enzo Traverso, The Jews & Germany, tr. Daniel Weissbort (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1995) 65–80. Roth’s contemporary counterpart would be Alain Finkielkraut, The Imaginary Jew, tr. Kevin O’Neill and David Suchoff (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1994). Jon D. Levenson, Sinai and Zion: An Entry into the Jewish Bible (New York: Harper & Row, 1987) 125. Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, vol. 2: Mythical Thought, tr. Ralph Manheim (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1955) 250–54.

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14 David Hartman, ‘The Challenge of Modern Israel to Traditional Judaism,’ MJ 7 (1987) 229–52. 15 Martin Buber, Ich und Du (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1995) 33. 16 Jerome I. Gellman,’The Meta-Philosophy of Religious Language,’ Nous 11 (1977) 151–61. 17 Ben-Ami Scharfstein, Ineffability: The Failure of Words in Philosophy and Religion (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993) 13. 18 See Steven T. Katz, ‘Language, Epistemology, and Mysticism,’ and Renford Bambrough, ‘Intuition and the Inexpressible,’ in Mysticism and Philosophical Analysis, ed. Steven T. Katz (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978) 22–74, 200–13; also Thomas McPherson, ‘Religion as the Inexpressible,’ in New Essays in Philosophical Theology, ed. Antony Flew and Alasdair MacIntyre (London: SCM Press, 1963) 131–43. 19 Louis Dupré, ‘Alienation and Redemption through Time and Memory: An Essay on Religious Time Consciousness,’ JAAR 43 (1975) 671–79. 20 HJP 799–203. 21 Star of Redemption, tr. Barbara E. Galli (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2005) 317. 22 Star of Redemption, tr. Galli, 266. 23 Abraham Joshua Heschel, The Sabbath: Its Meaning for Modern Man (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1979) 6. 24 Heschel, The Sabbath, 8. 25 Paul Minear, ‘Time and the Kingdom,’ JR 24 (1944) 77. 26 Abraham Joshua Heschel, God in Search of Man: A Philosophy of Judaism (New York: Harper & Row, 1955) 203. 27 God in Search of Man, 207. 28 Glatzer, Franz Rosenzweig 23–31; the paradoxical intimacy between the flawed individual and the righteous deity is evoked in the prayers of Yom Kippur Eve; see The Complete ArtScroll Machzor: Yom Kippur, ed. Nosson Scherman (New York: Mesorah, 1986), esp. 3,39–49, 103–43; the 1815 Roedelheim machzor that would still have been in use in some German communities a century later has been reprinted (rwpk Mwyl tyb(l rwzxm, Nanuet, NY: Feldheim, 2005). 29 The Star of Redemption, tr. William W. Hallo (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1985) 3; tr. Barbara E. Galli (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2005) 9. 30 Star of Redemption, 120 (Hallo). 31 For example, ‘So love is not attribute but event, and there is no place in it for an attribute’ (Star, 177). 32 A lucid discussion of some of the difficulties is found in Roger Scruton, Modern Philosophy: An Introduction and Survey (New York: Penguin Books, 1996) 365–77. 33 Confessions 11.17; this formula is still considered by some to be the ‘last word’ on the ineffability of time (Herbert Dingle, ‘Time in Philosophy and in Physics,’ Philosophy 54 [1979] 100). For an analytical engagement with the paradox, see J. N. Findlay, ‘Time: A Treatment of Some Puzzles (1941),’ in Findlay’s Language, Mind, and Value: Philosophical Essays (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1963) 39–56. 34 Hans Reichenbach, The Philosophy of Space & Time, tr. M. Reichenbach and J. Freund (New York: Dover, 1958), 6. Cf. Henri Poincaré, Science and Hypothesis (London: Walter Scott, 1905; rpt. New York: Dover, 1952) 35–41; and Gerald Holton, Thematic Origins of Scientific Thought: Kepler to Einstein (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1973), especially 190, in which, while discussing Poincaré, Holton states that ‘All modern analyses of science agree that two types of propositions are scientifically not meaningless, namely, propositions concerning empirical matters of “fact,” and propositions concerning the calculus of logic and mathematics that helps us to structure and analyze.’ 35 ‘Towards a Hermeneutic of Historical Consciousness’ is chapter 10 of Time and Narrative, vol. 3, tr. Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer (Chicago: University of

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Chicago Press, 1988) 207–40; for specific nuances of ‘consciousness’ see WPhB 80–83. Philo, Allegorical Interpretation of Genesis, I.2, tr. F. L. Colson and G. H. Whitaker (LCL Philo, vol. 1, 149). See e.g. Philo, ‘The Eternity of the World,’ (LCL Philo 9.184–291). and most recently for Maimonides, Kenneth Seeskin, Maimonides on the Origin of the World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), which offers a useful survey of Platonic and Neoplatonic precedents. See Godfrey Rolles Driver, Problems of the Hebrew Verbal System (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1936); Randall J. Buth, ‘The Hebrew Verb in Current Discussions,’ Journal of Translation and Textlinguistics 5 (1992) 91–105. On time being conceptualized differently from space, and the problems in measuring it, see Reichenbach, Philosophy of Space & Time, 109–19; and The Direction of Time, ed. Maria Reichenbach (Mineola, NY: Dover, 1999) 24–27, 125–35. For extended background see also G. Windred, ‘The History of Mathematical Time,’ Isis 19 (1933) 121–53; Chester G. Starr, ‘Historical and Philosophical Time,’ H&T 6, Beiheft 6 (1966) 24–35; and Steven F. Savitt, ‘The Direction of Time,’ British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 47 (1996) 347–70. See for example Stefan Körner, The Philosophy of Mathematics: An Introductory Essay (1960; rpt. Mineola, NY: Dover, 1986) 119–34; Lisa Shabel, ‘Kant’s Philosophy of Mathematics,’ in The Cambridge Companion to Kant and Modern Philosophy, ed. Paul Guyer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006) 94–128. The religious dimension of this orderliness should not be ignored; see J. E. McGuire, ‘Predicates of Pure Existence: Newton on God’s Space and Time,’ in Philosophical Perspectives on Newtonian Science, ed. Phillip Bricker and R. I. G. Hughes (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1990) 91–108. H. Minkowski, ‘Space and Time,’ in The Principle of Relativity, ed. & tr. A[rnold] Sommerfeld, W. Perrett and G. B. Jeffery (London: Methuen, 1923; rpt. Mineola, NY: Dover, 1952) 75. The unity of space and time, at least primordially, is described by Hasan S. Padamsee, Unifying the Universe: The Physics of Heaven and Earth (Bristol and Philadelphia: Institute of Physics Publishing, 2003) 618–32. Some of the initial challenges are assessed by Evander Bradley McGilvary, ‘Physics and Metaphysics,’ JP 29 (1932) 365–74. John K. McCreary uses the term ‘Anglo-American Realist’ for this school, though Russell, whom he includes, would later move away from this project; see McCreary, ‘The Religious Philosophy of Samuel Alexander,’ JR 27 (1947) 102–13. Valuable for the evolution of Process thought is Victor Lowe, ‘The Influence of Bergson, James and Alexander on Whitehead,’ JHI 10 (1949) 267–96. S[amuel] Alexander, Space, Time, and Deity (1927; rpt. New York: Dover, 1966) 1,195. On the complex relation of Judaism and Process philosophy see the essays in Sandra B. Lubarsky and David Ray Griffin, eds., Jewish Theology and Process Thought, SUNY Studies in Constructive Postmodern Thought (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996). Space, Time, and Deity, 1, 347: ‘Consider space–time, or indeed the universe however conceived, as lifted above its parts (or appearances as they are called), as something from which they represent a fall and degeneration; and the parts are unreal ultimately because of their finitude. … Within this matrix there may then be progressive types not so much of reality as of merit or perfection, as a rose may be a more perfect thing than a stone. There is room for an ascending scale of such perfection. But everything that truly is is really. The One is the system of the Many in which they are conserved[,] not the vortex in which they are engulfed.’ Space, Time, and Deity, 2, 341. If the disjunction of theology from the sciences has perpetuated the Enlightenment division between theism and deism, Process thought has attempted to reintegrate the two: for a heroic step in this direction see Charles Hartshorne, A Natural Theology

134 49 50 51 52

53 54 55 56

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for Our Time (La Salle, IL: Open Court, 1967), esp. chs. 1 and 4. Space, Time, and Deity, 2, 341–42. Space, Time, and Deity, 343. Space, Time, and Deity, 349. Alexander uses the term ‘nisus’ for this momentum, analogous to what Spinoza means by conatus; see Bertram D. Brettschneider, The Philosophy of Samuel Alexander: Idealism in ‘Space, Time and Deity’ (New York: Humanities Press, 1964) 150–54. Brettschneider, 155–56. Dorothy Emmet, ‘Time is the Mind of Space,’ Philosophy 25 (1950) 225–34. S[amuel] Alexander, Spinoza and Time (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1927) 44–45. Alexander, Spinoza and Time, 77.

Chapter 8

EPILOGUE

The historian of ideas enjoys the luxury of freedom from committing to any position regarding the subject of investigation. When invoking that right, we are able to appreciate the subtlety of this tradition without needing to question its cogency. If alienation is the common lot of humanity, then this body of thought speaks to the human condition; if on the other hand exile is the particular experience of certain cultures, these thinkers represent the profound reflection of one such people.1 The value of these works to each reader will depend upon whether one’s interest is spiritual or historical. That choice, in turn, may hinge upon whether one considers alienation a fixture of modern experience or an aberration to be overcome by rationality. At the dawn of the present century, Michael Morgan diagnosed a ‘crisis of objectivity’ besetting post-World War II Jewish reflection.2 Apart from the enviable eloquence of Morgan’s style, there was nothing new in that point: as we have seen, the incomprehensibility of the mid-century atrocities was both a starting-point and a stumbling-block for the survivors and their posterity, in coming decades to be comprised of persons to whom the events of those decades are the stuff of horrific legend rather than lived experience preserved as oral history. Morgan’s argument went further than the assertion that conventional protocols of understanding had been severely challenged by geopolitical realities; his exposition, originally presented in 1999 as lectures at Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati, pointed to the paradoxical stance of postmodernity, in which empirical certainty has been subordinated to a seemingly amorphous subjectivity. To use Lyotard’s terms, legitimation itself has suffered a crisis of credibility.3 Such a crisis may be less novel or tumultuous for a culture accustomed to reading history in the ironic mode.4 If we count the first Exile, Diaspora has been a fact of life for as long as Judaism was a religion, and its view of events has been the counterpart of those narratives written by history’s winners. In the words of Alexander Altmann, the exegetical interpretation of a history in which exile (galut) is the common base of experience ‘can be called an existential one, in the sense that in reading Scripture one is mindful of what lends a consolatory meaning to the sorrowful experience of Galut, and thus furnishes renewed strength to Jewish existence.’5

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In his contrast of analytical and existential philosophy, Edward Cell states clearly and succinctly that ‘Existential meaning refers to our basic way of looking at the world, the way of organizing and making sense of experience which is operative in everything we do.’6 This is a broader definition than appeared in the Introduction, but it is useful here as an affirmation of the durability of the enterprise. Questions of ultimate meaning are perennial; it is in how they are answered that they claim our attention. Apart from being dismissed as meaningless, such questions may be answered by reference to tradition or by interpretation of experience.7 The appeal to tradition, arguably the norm in hierarchical cultures, is rendered ironic when the normative system has collapsed, as has been the case with Judaism since the first century CE. In place of structural authority, the guidance of intuition has been in large measure the functional guarantor of continuity. The triad of Torah–Israel–God, each component of which was inverted with the destruction of the Temple and the scattering of the people, has been the focus of sustained devotional energy, in perennial combat against empirical facts which would lead a rational observer to dismiss the Jewish worldview as a myth abruptly nullified in antiquity. When all that remains is a collection of texts, then that body of writings becomes the focus of concentrated devotional application. Both as code and as narrative, the canonical Torah and Talmud are intentionally read as a promise, an ideal eventually (and inevitably) to be realized, rather than as a memorial of what has been hopelessly lost. That such an ideal existed is likewise an intentional affirmation: revelation is revelation by means of an act of faith rather than by virtue of historical veracity.8 The scriptural and Talmudic canons, compiled and codified in the wake of the first and second exiles, are adhered to in hope that all adversity is temporary; faith in a sovereign deity sustains the people amid hardship when it takes the form of devoted learning and draws the imagination away from the present to a promised fulfillment already documented in Torah. When all that remains is a community, then that band of persons will be held together by hope in the revealed promise. In the Diaspora ‘Israel’ took on the quality of an intentional people. This is not to say that the heirs of Abraham were no longer Jews: that they were, both in self-understanding and in the eyes of their host civilizations. But the single people Israel was real only in the pious imagination: the overarching unity that relativizes plurality was materially impossible to achieve. As a result, conceptions of self and neighbor were shaped by a spiritual vision hearkening back to the Patriarchal epic. Individuality, like autonomy, is a specious ideal, an invitation to disorder rather than to the divine ordering of the Covenant. When all that remains is the material realm, then that natural world will either be reduced to scientific terms or seen as the empirical counterpart of an otherworldly absolute. None can fail to notice that technological progress has driven a new quest for meaning, and a renewed sense that the source of such meaning must be a transcendent reality.9 It is too early to tell whether intuitionism is merely a cyclical reaction, like postmodernism, to the scientific

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worldview; but the successive waves of post-Enlightenment and postHolocaust writing about the dangers of secular progress offer eloquent defenses of non-empirical reality. Denying positivism the last word has not guaranteed the final triumph of any alternate worldview; at best it has kept open the conversation. The discovery of the aesthetic along with renewed regard for the religious imagination have granted piety a place of legitimacy, if not honor, in contemporary inquiry. For their reflections upon an orderly ideal in the face of disorder, the authors in the extended Jewish tradition – premodern and modern – collectively claim the attention of contemporary thinkers.10

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Notes 1

Whether there is such a common lot, or whether the experience of alienation is reducible to a single definition, is addressed by Richard Schacht, Alienation (Garden City: Doubleday, 1970) 249–67. 2 Michael L. Morgan, Interim Judaism: Jewish Thought in a Century of Crisis (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001) 27–45. A half century before Morgan gave these lectures, Nathan Rotenstreich diagnosed the post-World War II crisis in similar terms in ‘On the Intellectual Crisis of Our Time,’ Ethics 57 (1947) 111–20; and a presumed ‘crisis of meaning’ likewise shapes the narrative of William E. Kaufman, Contemporary Jewish Philosophies (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1992) 3–11, 251–71. 3 Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, tr. G. Bennington and B. Massumi, Theory and History of Literature, 10 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,1984) 6–9, 37–41; also Karlis Racevskis, Modernity’s Pretenses: Making Reality Fit Reason from Candide to the Gulag (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998) 33–49. 4 ‘Ironic’ in somewhat, though not precisely, the sense meant by Hayden White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973) 375–425. 5 Alexander Altmann, The Meaning of Jewish Existence: Theological Essays 1930–1939, ed. Alfred L. Ivry (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1991) 133. 6 Edward Cell, Language, Existence & God (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1971) 332. 7 One is reminded of the distinction between ‘authoritarian’ and ‘humanistic’ religion drawn by Erich Fromm, Psychoanalysis and Religion (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1950). 8 Jacob Neusner, The Transformation of Judaism: From Philosophy to Religion (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), esp. 284–314, speaks of early Diaspora Judaism as a ‘successor system,’ in which merit (zekhut) gained from pious activity, especially study, is the transformative agent. 9 In 1929 Joseph Wood Krutch could write that ‘The universe revealed by science, especially the sciences of biology and psychology, is one in which the human spirit cannot find a comfortable home’ (The Modern Temper: A Study and A Confession [New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1956] xi). 10 The need for a transcendent and objective ideal, and the capacity of this tradition to give it focus, are poignantly depicted by one of the foremost analytic philosophers of recent decades: Hilary Putnam, Jewish Philosophy as a Guide to Life: Rosenzweig, Buber, Levinas, Wittgenstein (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008) 100–108.

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INDEX

Aaron, 23 Abraham, 15–17, 19, 20–23, 30, 40, 69, 71, 72, 104, 123, 136 Abrahams, Israel, 93 Ackroyd, Peter R., 9 Adam, 19, 32, 89–90 Adams, Geoffrey, 9 Adams, James Luther, 114 Adamson, Peter, 43 aesthetics, 55 aggada, 83, 92 Ahlström, Gösta W., 41 Ahlstrom, Sydney E., 114 Akiva, Rabbi, 83 Alexander, Edward, 113 Alexander, Samuel, 128–30, 133–4 Alexandria, 31 Alkabetz, Shlomo HaLevi, 48 Allen, Douglas, 95 Allen, Jeffner, 134 Alter, Robert, 25 alterity, 105–106 Altertumswissenschaft, 64 Altmann, Alexander, 135, 138 Amsterdam, 49 Andrews-Rusiecka, Hilda, 77 Anschutz, Gerhard, 113 Apelt, Willibalt, 113 Arendt, Hannah, 80, 93, 107, 113–14 Aristotle, 49, 54, 55, 68, 97, 105 Arkush, Allan, 9, 74 Aronowicz, Annette, 96 Ash, Beth Sharon, 25 Ashkenaz, 65, 66 Assmann, Jan, 41 atonement, 104, 123 Audra, R. Ashley, 131 Augustine, 88, 125, 132

Auschwitz, 108–10 Avery-Peck, Alan J., 41 Avot of Rabbi Nathan, 4, 9 Axinn, Sidney, 76 Baal Shem Tov, 66, 80–82, 94 Babel, 20 Babylon, 20, 34 Bachya ben Joseph ibn Paquda, 94 Bacon, Francis, 53, 127 Baeck, Leo, 67, 76, 102 Baer, Yitzhak, 58 Bamberger, Fritz, 74 Bambrough, Renford, 132 Bar Kokhba, 109 Bar-Gal, Yoram, 58 Baron, Salo W. 43, 59 Barrett, William, 11 Barth, Karl, 7, 11, 100 Bartuschat, Wolfgang, 59 Baumgarten, Alexander Gottlieb, 105 Baumgartner, Walter, 25 Beck, Maximilian, 10 Bein, Alex, 131 Beisser, Frederick C., 111 Bell, David, 76 Bennington, G., 138 Berdyaev, Nikolai, 7, 11, 78 Berger, Benjamin Kyle, 114 Berger, Michael S., 41 Bergson, Henri, 116, 117, 131 Berlin, 82, 83, 87 Bernasconi, Robert, 96, 113 Bewußtsein, 68, 70, 86, 88, 125 Beyerchen, Alan D., 131 Biale, David, 75 Bialik, Haim Nahman, 95 Biderman, Shlomo, 114

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Bixler, Julius Seelye, 10 Blackham, H.J., 113 Blamey, Kathleen, 41, 132 Bleich, J. David, 114 Boehme, Jacob, 80 Book of the Pious, 66 Borowitz, Eugene B., 76, 111 Boyarin, Daniel, 9 Boyarin, Jonathan, 9, 41 Braiterman, Zachary, 109, 115 Brazill, William J., 111 Brecht, Arnold, 113 Brentano, Franz, 10, 68, 76 Brereton, Cloudesley, 131 Brett, Mark G., 76 Brettler, Marc Zvi, 9 Brettschneider, Bertram D., 134 Breuer, Edward, 9, 74 Bricker, Phillip, 133 b’rit, 19, 21 Broadie, Alexander, 59 Brody, Robert, 42 Brody, Seth, 59 Brown, Marshall, 60 Brown, Norman O., 59 Browne, Lawrence B., 41 Bruns, Gerald L., 52, 93 Buber, Martin, 80–82, 84–5, 93–4, 98–100, 102–103, 105–106, 118–22, 132 Budge, E.A. Wallis, 25 Buijs, Joseph A., 43 Bulan, King of the Khazars, 37 Bultmann, Rudolf, 7, 11, 85 Buth, Randall J., 133 Cabrera, Isabel, 114 Cahnmann, Werner J., 112 Cain, 15, 24, 32, 43 Canaan, 2, 20, 23, 101–102 Cantor, Norman F., 112 Carlebach, Elisheva, 9 Carr, Spencer, 59 Cassirer, Ernst, 24, 107, 114, 131 Cell, Edward, 136, 138 Cerf, Walter, 10 Chalier, Catherine, 96 Charmé, Stuart, 112 Chazan, Robert, 43, 58, 75 Childs, Brevard, 94

Chipman, Jonathan, 131 Christianity, 34, 46, 49, 52, 62, 65–6, 70–71, 80, 84–5, 101, 123–4, 126–7 [2] Chronicles, 20 Clark, Christopher, 111 Clarke, Bowman L., 114 Clarke, D.S., 10 Cody, Aelred, 25 Coffin, William Sloane, 82 Cohen, Arthur, 108, 112, 114–15 Cohen, Hermann, 43, 69–71, 77, 87, 88, 112, 131 Cohen, Shaye J. D., 9 Cohon, Samuel S., 131 Collins, John J., 42 Colson, F.L., 133 Comstock, Richard, 111 conatus, 50, 103 Confino, Alon, 41 Connerton, Paul, 41 consciousness (see also Bewußtsein), 68, 88, 104–105 Conservative Judaism, 66 Cooperman, Bernard Dov, 58 Copleston, Frederick, S.J., 10 Cordova, 46 Cordovero, Moshe, 48 Coser, Lewis A., 41 cosmology, 127–30 covenant, 19–23, 29, 35, 97,125–26 Cowen, Shimon, 114 Cox, Harvey, 114 Crane, Susan A., 41 Craufurd, Emma, 113 Critchley, Simon, 96, 113 Crowley, J. Edward, 26 Cusa, Nicholas of, 80 Cyrus, 20, 34, 119 Dahlstrom, Daniel O., 74 Dan, Joseph, 75 David, 22, 23, 33 Davidson, Herbert A., 43 Davies, Philip R., 24, 42 De Leon, Moses, 46 De Schloezer, Boris, 87 Deleuze, Gilles, 112 Delitsch, Franz, 75 Demetz, Peter, 9

Index Demonic, 107 Denton, John, 77 Descartes, René, 55, 97 Dessoir, Max, 86, 94 Di Giovanni, George, 60 Días Más, Paloma, 58 Dingle, Herbert, 132 divine pathos, 84–5 Don-Yehiya, Eliezer, 131 Dostoevsky, F., 72 Dresner, Samuel H., 93 Driver, Godfrey Rolles, 133 Drost, Mark P., 76 Dubnow, Simon, 75 Dugginton, Natalie, 77 Dupré, Louis, 10, 132 Durkheim, Emile, 24 Dussort, Henri, 76 Earle, William, 10 Ecclesiastes, 23, 108 Eden, 1, 17, 20, 32 Edie, James, 10 Effertz, Dirk, 113 Egypt, 18, 22, 23, 30–31, 37, 65, 91 Ehrenberg, Rudolf, 103 Eisen, Arnold M., 9, 131 Eisen, Robert, 41, 114, 115 Eisenstein-Barzilay, Isaac, 74 Elbogen, Ismar, 118, 131 Eliade, Mircea, 95 Eliot, George, 111 Ellenson, David, 74 Elon, Amos, 131 Elwolde, John, 25 emancipation, 54, 101 Emmet, Dorothy, 134 England, 66 Enlightenment, 61–2, 87, 107, 137 Erlösung, 103 Erspamer, Peter, 9 Ewald, Oscar, 76 Exile (587–36 BCE), 22, 35 Existentialism, 4–7, 50–51, 88, 121, 136 Exodus, 17–18, 22, 25, 27–8, 40, 47, 61, 91, 101 Ezra, 18, 34 Fackenheim, Emil, 109–10, 115

165

Faierstein, Morris M., 94 Falk, Ze’ev W., 93 Faur, José, 44 Feiner, Shmuel, 74 Feld, Edward, 59 Feldman, Jackie, 95 Feldman, Louis H., 42 Feldman, Ron H., 93 Feldman, Seymour, 59 Ferdinand of Aragon, 46 Feuer, Avrohom Chaim, 42 Feuerbach, Ludwig, 98, 111 Findlay, J.N., 132 Finkieltraut, Alain, 131 Fishbane, Michael, 24 Flew, Antony, 132 Flight, John W., 25 Føllesdal, Dagfinn, 10 France, 66 Frank, Daniel H., 43 Franks, Paul W., 112 Frederick II, Emperor, 2 Freiburg, 69 Freund, J., 133 Friedman, Maurice, 93, 94, 111, 112 Fromm, Erich, 138 Frye, Northrop, 14, 24 Gadamer, Hans-Georg, 90 Galli, Barbara, 112, 132 galut, 135 Gaon of Vilna, 87 Gaonim, 34, 35, 46 Garrett, Don, 59 Gefühl, 63, 97, 120 Gellman, Jerome I., 77, 132 Genesis, 13–14, 67, 71, 89 cited, 7, 8, 13–14, 15, 16, 17, 20, 21, 24, 30, 52 Gerrish, B.A., 111 Gifford Lectures, 128 Gillman, Neil, 10 Glatzer, Nahum N., 93, 111, 112 Glick, Leonard B., 75 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 6, 79, 117 Gold, Avie, 42, 76 Goldin, Judah, 9 Goldstein, Walter, 77 Golem, 48

166

Exile and Restoration in Jewish Thought

Goodman, Lenn E., 59 Goodman, Martin, 41 Gordon, Peter Eli, 76, 112 Gottlieb, Michah, 74 grace, 100 Graetz, Heinrich, 58 Grafton, Anthony, 74 Graupe, Heinz Mosche, 9, 74 Gray, John, 43 Greeks, 32 Gruen, Erich S., 42 Greenberg, Gershon, 114 Greenstein, Edward L., 25 Griffin, David Ray, 133 Gurock, Jeffrey S., 95 Gurwitsch, Aron, 10 Guttmann, James, 60, Guttmann, Joseph, 11 Guyer, Paul, 60, 133 Haberman, Jacob, 76 Haberman, Joshua O., 74 halakhah, 83, 88–9, 92, 96 Halbertal, Moshe, 24, 95 Halbwachs, Maurice, 41 HaLevi, Jehudah, 37, 43 Halivni, David Weiss, 24, 25, 114, 115 Hallo, Rudolf, 9 Hallo, William, 132 Halperin, David J., 58 Ham, 16 Hamilton, Kenneth, 95 Hand, Séan, 96 Harari, Manya, 113 Hare, Peter H., 114 Harnack, Adolf von, 67, 75 Harney, Maurita J., 10 Harshav, Barbara, 113 Hartman, David, 43, 95, 132 Hartshorne, Charles, 133–4 Harvey, John 76, 114 Harvey, Steven, 43 Hasidism, 65–6, 68, 72–3, 80–82, 85–6, 116, 117 Haskalah, 61, 121 Hayes, John H., 112 Hazelton, Roger, 113 Hebrew Union College, 82, 135 Hedwig, Klaus, 10

Hegel, G.W.F., 5, 56, 75, 98, 103, 109, 111 Heidegger, Martin, 124 Heidelberg, 69 Heinemann, F. H., 6, 11 Hendel, Charles W., 24 Hendel, Ronald S., 41 Herberg, Will, 10–11 Hernandez, Frances, 94 Hertz, J.M., 42 Hertzberg, Arthur, 9 Hertzl (Herzl), Theodor, 118, 131 Heschel, Abraham Joshua, 80, 82–6, 93–4, 103, 121–2 Heschel, Susannah, 74 hesed, 4, 66 Hess, Jonathan M., 74 Hewitt, Elinor, 11 Hickerson, Ryan, 76 Hirsch, E.D., 60 Hirsch, Samson Raphael, 65, 75 Hirshman, Marc, 76 historicism, 64 Hitler, Adolf, 107, 109 Hocking, William Ernest, 94 Hollinger, Robin, 76 Holocaust, 107–10, 115, 137 Holton, Gerald, 133 homo religiosus, 88–9, 95 Horowitz, Brian, 78 Hughes, R.I.G., 133 Hurvitz, Avi, 42 Husik, Isaac, 59 Husserl, Edmund, 68, 69, 76, 87, 100, 104–105 Hyman, Arthur, 43 Iberian peninsula, 46–7, 66 Ibn Khaldûn, 25 Idealism, 80 Idel, Moshe, 58 intentionality, 68, 105 intuition, 51, 54, 69, 97, 103, 104, 129 Isaac, 23 Ishmael, 83 Islam, 34, 46 Israel, 14, 16, 18, 28, 30, 67–8, 97, 104, 100–102, 108, 119 the modern state, 119

Index Israel, Jonathan I., 59 Italy, 66 Ivry, Alfred L., 43, 138 Jacob, 23, 100 Jacob, Walter, 75 Jacquette, Dale, 76 Jaeschke, Walter, 111 Jaffee, Martin S., 93 Jamison, A. Leland, 9 Janzen, J. Gerald, 25 Japheth, 16 Jeanrond, Werner G., 41 Jeffery, G.B., 133 Jeremiah, 25, 33 Jerusalem, 16, 39, 46, 100, 119 Jesus, 71 Joachim, Harold H., 59 Job, 27, 72, 73, 108, 109, 110, 115 Jonas, Hans, 114 Joughin, Martin, 112 Joseph, 23 Joshua, 18–20, 22, 25 Judah, 18 Judas Maccabeus, 4 Judea, 31, 33 Judges, 19, 25 Kabbalah, 45, 48, 50, 58, 73, 115, 130 Kaisenberg, Georg, 113 Kalam, 37, 43 Kansteiner, Wulf, 41 Kant, Immanuel, 55–6, 63, 68–71, 73, 88, 97, 105, 121, 128 Kapelrud, Arvid S., 24 Kaplan, Edward K., 93 Kaplan, Lawrence, 95 Kaplan, Simon, 77 Katz, Jacob, 9 Katz, Steven T., 109, 114, 115, 132 Kaufman, William E., 138 Kaufmann, Fritz, 76 Kaufmann, Walter, 111 Khazars, 37 Kierkegaard, Søren, 5, 7, 11, 71–3, 77 Kieval, Hillel J., 58 Kimball, Robert C., 112 Kimelman, Reuven, 11

167

King, Martin Luther, 82 [2] Kings, 25 Kinnaman, Ted, 60 Kirk, G.S., 25 Kirwan, James, 60 Klatzkin, Jakob, 77 Klausner, Joseph, 58 Klein, Felix, 117 Klemm, David, 41 Kluback, William, 77 Knapp, Steven, 41 Koehler, Ludwig, 25 Kogan, Barry S., 43 Kohn, Jerome, 93 Königsberg, 55 Kornberg, Jacques, 131 Kornblatt, Judith Deutsch, 77 Körner, Stefan, 133 Korobkin, N. Daniel, 43 Kraft, Robert A., 41 Kraus, Herbert, 113 Kren, George M., 115 Krutch, Joseph Wood, 138 Kuhns, Richard, 11 LaFargue, Michael, 25 Lamentations, 33 Lamm, Julia A., 111 Langer, S.K., 24 Laqueur, Walter, 131 Lara, María Pía, 114 Lauer, Quentin, 10 Laurila, Kaarle S., 94 Leaman, Oliver, 43, 115 Lea, Charlene A., 9 Lee, Won W., 25 Lehrhaus (Frankfurt), 82, 102, 112 Leibniz, Gottfried, 62 Lemche, Niels Peter, 41 Lescoe, Francis J., 10 Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim, 3, 9 Levenson, Alan T., 75 Levenson, Jon D., 24, 25, 76, 131 Leventhal, Robert S., 74 Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 25 Levin, Leonard, 93 Levinas, Emmanuel, 87, 90–92, 96, 104–106, 112–13 Liberles, Robert, 75 Liberman, Serge, 114

168

Exile and Restoration in Jewish Thought

Linafelt, Tod, 114, 115 Lindbeck, George, 87, 94 Lingis, Alphonso, 113 Lipset, Seymour Martin, 113 Lithuania, 66, 82, 87, 90, 91, 106 Lobkowitz, N., 111 Loewenstein, Karl, 113 Löw, Jehudah, 48 Lowe, Victor, 133 Lowrie, Walter, 11, 77 Lubarsky, Sandra B., 133 Luther, Martin, 3, 73 Lyas, Colin, 114 Lyotard, Jean-François, 138, 138 McCormick, Peter, 111 McCreary, John K., 133 McGilvary, Evander Bradley, 133 McGuire, J.E., 133 MacIntyre, Alasdair, 132 McIntyre, Ronald, 10 McLaughlin, Kathleen, 24 McPherson, Thomas, 132 Madden, Edward H., 114 Maimonides, 37–9, 43, 46, 76,126, 133 Malter, Rudolf, 60 Manheim, Ralph, 131 Marranos, 49 Marburg, 69, 87 Marcel, Gabriel, 106, 113 Marcus, Ivan, 75 Margolis, Joseph, 76 Marina, Jacqueline, 111 Marinet, P., 10 Marion, Jean-Luc, 113 Martin, Bernard, 78 Marty, Martin E., 9, 115, 114 Marus, Jacob R., 58 Marx, Karl, 98 Massumi, G., 138 Megill, Allan, 60 Meissner, Otto, 113 Melnick, Ralph, 115 Mendelssohn, Moses, 3–4, 62, 74, 101, 119 Mendes-Flohr, Paul, 112, 114, 131 Messianism, 47, 48, 58, 121 Methodism, 66 Meyer, Michael A., 9, 74, 76, 131

Mijuskovic, Ben 10 Miller, David L., 95 Miller, J. Maxwell, 112 Minear, Paul, 132 Minkowski, Herman, 117, 128, 133 Mirsky, D.S., 78 Mishnah, 29 Mitnagdim, 91 mitzvah, 70 Mole, Gary D., 96 Mondésert, C., 42 Montefiore, C.G., 11 Mora, José Ferrater, 113 Morak, Samuel H., 60 Morgan, Bayard, 9 Morgan, Michael L., 74, 112, 135, 138 Morrison, James C., 10 Morrison, Robert E., 24 Moses, 17–18, 19, 23, 34, 84 Moye, Richard H., 24 Moyn, Samuel 113 Myers, W.S., 113 Nachmainides, 39–40, 43–4 Nadler, Allan, 75, 95, 131 Nadler, Steven, 59 Natanson, Maurice, 76 Natorp, Paul, 69, 76 Naunen, Franz, 77 Nazism, 107–108 Nehemiah, cited, 18 Neiman, Susan, 114 Neo-Kantianism, 69, 87–8, 124 Neo-Orthodoxy (Christian), 100 Neusner, Jacob, 11, 24, 25, 35, 41, 42, 75, 93, 112, 115, 138 ‘New Thinking’, 102 Newman, Amy, 75 Nickelsburg, George, 41 Niditch, Susan, 42, 93 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 71 Noah, 16, 19, 21, 30 Noel, Daniel C., 114 Novak, David, 43, 112 Ogden, C.K., 115 Ogden, Schubert M., 11 ‘olam, 21, 31, 121 O’Neill, Kevin, 137

Index Origen, 32 Orsini, G.N.G., 111 Orthodoxy, 65, 66, 79 Otto, Rudolf, 68–9, 76, 108, 114 Padamsee, Hasan S., 133 Pamplune, Louis, 113 Panko, Stephen M., 93 Pascal, Blaise, 2, 6, 49, 50 Patterson, David, 115 Payne, E.J.F., 60 Peerman, Dean G., 9, 14, 115 Pellauer, David, 24, 41,132 Pelli, Moshe, 76 Pépin, Jean, 42 Perles, Felix, 75 Perpich, Diane, 113 Perrett, W, 133 Pfeiffer, Rudolf, 74 Pharaoh, 18, 22, 27, 61 phenomenology, 8, 51, 81, 88, 90, 106, 116, 120, 125–6 Philipson, David, 131 Philo, 32, 42, 106, 126, 133 Phoenicia, 100 Pietism, Christian, 68 Pines, Shlomo, 43 Pinkard, Terry, 60 Piyyutim, 33 Plato, 55, 56, 104, 113 Platonism, 39, 69, 97, 124 Poincaré, Henri, 133 Poland, Lynn, 60, 66 Politzer, Heinz, 9 Poma, Andrea, 7 Popkin, Richard H., 59 Popov, Paul, 112 Popper, Karl, 10 progress, 64, 101, 127–8 Prophets and prophecy, 19, 30, 31, 62, 83–4, 89, 94, 95 Psalms, 22, 23, 33, 47, 84 Purcell, Michael, 96 Putnam, Hilary, 78, 138 Qur‘ān, 79 rabbinism, 68, 90, 116 Racevskis, Karlis, 138 Raffel, Charles M., 114

169

Rancurello, A.C., 76 Rappoport, Leon, 115 Rashi, 24, 25, 42 Ravitzky, Aviezer, 95, 131 Ravven, Heidi M., 59 Rawidowicz, Simon, 41 Rebbe, 65 redemption, 8, 117–18 Reform Judaism, 65, 66, 79, 118, 123 Reichenbach, Hans, 10, 127, 132, 133 Reichenbach, Maria, 132, 133 Reif, Stefan C., 11 Rendtorff, Rolf, 25 Revelation, 63, 70, 92 Rickert, Heinrich, 68 Ricoeur, Paul, 24, 41, 90, 94, 114, 125, 132 Rilke, Rainer Maria, 6 Robbins, Jill, 96 Roberts, David E., 59 Robinson, H. Wheeler, 25 Rödl, Sebastian, 111 Roemer, Nils, 74 Roman Empire, 2 Romanticism, 56, 63, 120 Rosenberg, Shalom, 58 Rosenblatt, Samuel, 42 Rosenstock, Bruce, 58 Rosenthal, Franz, 25 Rosenzweig, Franz, 85, 102, 102–104, 110, 112, 121–4, 132 Rotenstreich, Nathan, 74, 75, 94, 138 Roth, Joseph, 131 Roubiczek, Paul, 112 Rowe, David E., 32–3, 131 Roy, Louis, 111 Rubenstein, Richard, 108–109, 114–15 Runia, David T., 42 Russell, Bertrand, 133 Russia, 72 Saadia Gaon, 35, 42 Sachar, Howard M., 9 Sacks, Jonathan, 115 Sáenz-Badillos, Angel, 25 Safed, 47–8 Samaria, 100

170

Exile and Restoration in Jewish Thought

[1] Samuel, 18, 19, 22, 25 Sarah, 30 Sarna, Nahum M., 41 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 6, 10, 104 Satlow, Michael P., 11 Saunders, Thomas B., 75 Savitt, Steven T., 132 Schacht, Richard, 138 Scharfstein, Ben-Ami, 132 Scheindlin, Raymond P., 131 Schelling, Friedrich, 56, 60, 112 Scherman, Nosson, 11, 77, 131, 132 Schilpp, Paul Arthur, 76 Schmidt, Nathaniel, 77 Schneewind, J.B., 74 Schniedewind, William M., 42 Schoeps, Hans-Joachim, 74 Schoffman, Louis, 58 Scholasticism, 55, 68, 124 Scholem, Gershom, 58, 75, 131 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 56, 60 Schwartz, Dov, 95 Scott, Joanna Vecchiarelli, 113–14 Scruton, Roger, 132 Searle, John R.10 Seeskin, Kenneth, 43, 77, 115, 133 Sefer Hasidim, 66 sefirot, 45–6, 48, 50 Segal, M.H, 41 Seigel, Jerrold, 111 Sephardic Jewry, 37, 39, 45–9, 61, 66 Shabel, Lisa, 133 Shalom, 31 Shapiro, Michael, 111 Sharot, Stephen, 58 Shavuot, 23 Shechem, 100 Shein, Louis, S., 78 Shem, 16 Sherwin, Byron L., 58 Shestov, Lev, 11, 71–3, 78 Shields, Rob, 96 shtetl, 65–6, 80–81, 83, 91 Silberstein, Laurence J., 93 Silver, Daniel Jeremy, 114 Simon, Maurice, 58 Sinai, 19, 30, 47, 66 Singer, David, 75, 95, 96 Singer, Sholom A., 75 Sirat, Collette, 59

Slater, Peter, 114 Smith, David Woodruff, 10 Smith, Louise Pettibone, 93 Smith, Michael B., 113 Smith, Roland G., 111 Soggin, J. Alberto, 25 Sokol, Moshe, 95, 96 Solomon, Robert C., 10 Soloveitchik, Haym, 75 Soloveitchik, Joseph, 85, 87–90, 94, 95, 95–6 Soloveitchik, Moshe, 88 Sommer, Benjamin D., 41 Sommerfeld, Arnold, 133 Song of Songs, 48 Sorkin, David, 9, 74 space–time, 128–9 Sperling, Harry, 58 Spero, Shubert, 75, 95 Spiegelberg, Herbert, 10 Spinoza, Baruch, 49–55, 59, 62, 79, 103, 106, 110, 128–30 Starr, Chester T., 132 Stein, Batya, 95 Stein, Edmund, 42 Steinheim, Salomon Ludwig, 62–3, 74 Stendahl, Krister, 24 Stern, David, 112, 114 Stevenson, W. Taylor, 111–12 Stillman, Norman A., 58 Stoebe, Hans Joachim, 75 Stone, Michael E., 11 Strack, Hermann, 75 Strauss, Leo, 43, 114 Strawson, P.F., 10 Suchoff, David, 131 Sukkot, 23 Surin, Kenneth, 114 Sutcliffe, Adam, 59 Swain, J.W., 24 Swirsky, Michael, 131 Szarmach, Paul E., 58 Talmud, 66, 87–92 Taylor, Alan R., 131 Taylor, Richard C., 43 Temple, 29, 30, 62, 100, 101, 119 Second, 18, 29, 30, 33, 47, 63, 108, 125 tikkun, 110, 115

Index Tillich, Paul, 11, 93, 95, 100, 112, 114, 125 time, 122, 125–7 Tisha b’Av, 33 Titus, Emperor, 42 Toledo, 46 Torah, 14, 17, 28, 30–31, 35–6, 38–40, 50, 66, 79, 82–3, 92, 120 Oral Torah, 46, 117, 28–9 Tournay, Raymond Jacques, 26 Trask, Willard R., 95 Traverso, Enzo, 131 Trotter, F. Thomas, 114 Tucker, Gordon, 93 Udoff, Alan, 93, 112 Uffenheimer, Rivka Schatz, 59 Unamuno, Miguel de, 6 Urbach, Ephraim E., 93 Vahanian, Gabriel, 112 Van Seters, John, 26 VanderZande, Johan, 60 Vermes, Geza, 24 Vernunft, 69 via negativa, 123 Vilna, 82 Vogel, Manfred H., 9 Von Dohm, Christian, 3–4 Waaijman, Kees, 96 Wachinger, Lorenz, 112 Walicki, Andrzej, 77 Wallace, Mark I., 94 Walsøe-Engel, Ingrid, 9 Warsaw, 82 Wartsch, James V., 41 Watkins, Frederick M., 113 Waxman, Chaim F., 131 Weimar, 107 Weingrad, Michael, 78 Weissbort, Daniel, 131 Welch, Claude, 77, 111 Wells, C.J., 112 Werblowsky, R.J. Zwi, 58 Westmann, Heinz, 11 Wettstein, Howard, 42 Whitaker, G.H., 133 White, Hayden, 24, 138

171

Whitehead, Alfred North, 55, 124, 128 Whitfield, F.J., 78 Wiedermaier, William Cannon, 78 Wiehl, Reiner, 112 Wiesel, Elie, 94 Wieseltier, Leon, 74–5 Wild, John, 10 Wildavsky, Aaron, 74 Williams, Robert, 111 Wilson, Margaret I., 59 Winston, David, 42 Winter, J. Alan,11 Wisner, David A., 114 Wissenschaft des Judentums, 64, 82, 118 Wistrich, Robert S., 74 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 115 Woglom, William H., 24 Wolf, Abraham, 75–6 Wolff, Christian, 105, 113 Wolff, H.W., 25 Wolfson, Elliot, 50, 75 Wolfson, Harry Austryn, 43, 59 World War I, 73 Wyschogrod, Edith, 113 Yale Divinity School, 87 Yerushalmi, Yosef Hayim, 41 Yeshiva University, 88 Yom Kippur, 103, 123, 132 Young, Ian M. 42 Young-Bruehl, Elisabeth, 114 Zac, Sylvain, 76–7 Zeitlin, Solomon, 9 Zevi, Shabbetai, 48, 83 Zimmer, Yitzhak, 75 Zion, 2, 8, 20, 47,101–102, 118–19, 121 Zionism, 118–19 Zlotowitz, Meir, 77, 131 Zoeller, Guenther, 76 Zohar, 45–6, 66 Zonta, Mauro, 43 Zornberg, Arivah Gottlieb, 24 Zuesse, Evan M., 76